End Game Turntable suggestions

An uncommon brand with a great lineage is Nottingham Analogue. Their Dais design was one of the last by the late great Tom Fletcher. Best to buy from the UK. Price without tax is in your range.

I have the predecessor Mentor with a custom plinth and Dais bearing, motor and power supply. It doesn’t perform to the level of my DIY all air bearing (thrust AND radial air) table, but it’s no disgrace in that company. Add a Terminator air tonearm (if available) and you have a superb piece that will last you until you have a six figure itch.

One quirk with the Dais: you have to start it rotating by hand. Fletcher’s great insight was to use a precision low power motor, which was only just strong enough to rotate the platter against bearing friction. That leaves very little energy to turn into noise. And it works out that way in practice - the background is astonishingly black.

As to Panzerholz, I use it for the motor board of my turntable and for the arm wand. It excels at both.

I also built a Pz wand for a Terminator, which had similar benefits, but not as much. I am using the heavy Pz as my main analogue.

@pindac I built (actually, most of the woodwork was done to my specifications) three Pz wands for my air bearing DIY tonearm. First was just a flat piece 4mm thick Pz with a Pz spine. It was the lightest and worked quite well.

Second was a hollow cone of Pz with the grain running the length of the wand. It was heavier and better.

Third was a hollow cone consisting of rings epoxied together. This was heaviest and best.

Sound was all that you suggest: more detail, especially micro-detail. But the over-riding impressions were sweetness and realism. The harshness seemed to have all been damped away. Cartridge was a Koetsu with diamond cantilever.

I will also be building a lighter version of the last attempt, and a sapphire wand for comparison.

Once you have experienced frictionless bearings in all dimensions, everything else sounds like a bad compromise. Air is the easiest way to do this, but you can do mag lev for thrust and air for lateral. It works just as well IME.

As for a Pz plinth, it depends where the vibration happens. I use an air thrust bushing, that's an air cushion in all 3 dimensions, so my platter bearing noise is literally nil. So I don't need Pz for a platter board. Instead, I need rigidity and speed of sound to connect the bushing to the tonearm.

But my motor does produce vibration, so I have a heavy Pz slab to anchor the motor, and then isolation to isolate that from the main board, also Pz, which supports everything. This is unlike some who don't bother to engineer the interface between motor and platter - but ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away.

Anyhow, Pz for motor board and Pz for the main board connecting the motor and platter boards. Works for me. YMMV