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My personal experience with Direct Drive versus Belt Drive

This is my personal , yet limited experience, with a DD versus Belt Drive. This A/B took place in the same system. with literally the same tonearm. I am choosing not to mention brands at this point. I feel by keeping the brand out of the discussion, anyone who contributes to the the thread (myself included), can be a bit more forthcoming. I am not big on audiophile jargon, so I will keep this short and sweet. I started with DD, in a system which I was very familiar with. The room of course, was different. The DD struck me as near perfect. I could hear the starting and stopping on a dime, and the near perfect timing that many have associated with the DD.  It didn't take long at all for me to conclude this was not my cup of tea. It satisfied my brain, but didn't move my heart. Maybe I was used to the imperfect sound of belt drives, and it was indeed that imperfection, that made for an emotional experience. Who knows? (-: Fast forward to the belt drive.... Again, same actual arm. It sounded more analog to me. Decay was much more easy to hear, along with subtle spatial cues. Was it the less than perfect timing, that was allowing me to now hear these things I could not with the DD?  I have no clue! What I was sure about was the emotion of the music had returned.
fjn04
rainer_s's avatar
rainer_s
5 posts
 
Often wondered if the effect of belt drive (and analogue tape, to an extent) might be called "temporal dither".

That said, it’s been proposed that DD’s might add their own artifacts (perhaps at flutter frequencies), which while at very low amplitude are less benign that those of belt systems.

pbnaudio's avatar
pbnaudio
1,613 posts
 
Added a new picture to the Denon DN 308 rebuild system - they are coming along 

https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/6431#&gid=1&pid=8

Good Listening


Peter
hiho
451 posts
 
Lew & Chris, I mentioned the VPI TNT 3 pulley design only as an extreme example of the multiple pulley genre. I agree it's gimmicky and pulleys make noise too. Three pulleys create too much empty spaces and not enough contact area for platter grip and might cause slippage. You only need one extra pulley at equidistant from the motor pulley to offset the tug on motor side, if that's the approach a designer would take to combat bearing imbalance. 

In belt drive genre, I am fan of non-compliant material such as tape, string, dental floss, etc... Without compliance, you still have decoupling but you do lose motor isolation. So a quiet motor becomes paramount. I used to use a direct drive table to tape drive a passive platter and it worked out really well. My preferred interface was VHS tape. Having two turntables side by side tape driving each other took up a lot of table space so I gave it up. But, yeah, non-compliant material works well and I am not surprised by the positive finding by others. Happy listening!

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