Direct Drive

Do yourself a favor and look at the Denon DL-103 carts, your gonna need a step up transformer like a used Denon AU-320 to use it with a MM phono stage. Like speakers, carts are transducers. Those DL-103 just make music!

Lots of good vintage DD units out there. Denon DP-75 or DP-80 are very good from what I understand. I’m partial to the Victor (JVC) line of motor drives, anything from the TT71 up to the TT101 will give you excellent results.

At this age any of those old DD motor drives need a good maintenance done to them. When done right there is another generation or two of keeping perfect speed before it needs attention again.

Bottom line is there will never be motor units built like these again. Technics has done it, but see the price? What do you think any of these old DD motor units would cost if built today? To get an idea, look at the price of the Technics, the top of the line model.

Look at the turntable in  my profile, yea, I need better pics. Anyway, this is a Victor 2 armboard plinth, model CL-2P. It's a heavy wood structure made with alternating layers of different material. I made my own armboards with quick change inserts so I can play with different arms. Currently sporting a Audio Technica ATP-12T in the rear with a stock DL-103 and the right side arm is a Victor UA-7045, perfect for my DL-103S.

All in I spent just a little more than the price of a Technics 1500

BillWojo

"If you want to buy a direct drive turntable you might as well buy a digital front end - its the same sound."

That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! Just because a TT maintains perfect speed as the better DD tables are prone to due doesn’t make it sound digital. By that logic the worse a TT maintains speed the more it sounds like analog produced music, totally absurd. The decks used for cutting the master disc are designed with perfect unwavering speed in mind.

BillWojo

@dover , you always make this claim about DD tables. Please provide your documentation to back up these claims. You do know that "jitter" is something that happens at a fairly high rate. I'm sure a steady test tone would reveal this pretty easy, and be easy to document with numbers. Rather funny that I haven't seen these reports.

BillWojo

For vintage DD tables I look no further that Victor, better known to most as JVC.

My TT71 motor drive unit is a beautifully crafted and precise operating DD table that uses a DC motor. It's a 12 pole, 24 slot DC brushless motor with a frequency detection circuit that uses a 180 slot frequency generator yoke with a magnetic disc and a printed circuit board with 180 coils printed on it. Needless to say, speed is very accurate and wow and flutter is very low.

Most folks don't realize that Victor invented the modern quartz locked direct drive motor system. Victor was a engineering company that shifted it's focus from audio to video in later years and became leaders in that field as well. Victor supplied motor drives to other companies as well, Micro Seiki being one of them.

BillWojo