Macrojack, the car analogy to me was not that bad. Car companies have had plenty of cash to play with R&D (until recently), but due to the corporate climate that was the *last* thing they were going to do. The result is that there has been only incremental improvement over the years. The same is true of turntables.
If you take a good car or good turntable from the 1960s, and outfit it with newer tweaks (vibration damping for example), many of them will perform quite nicely against the current lineup. IMO in the case of cars it should not be that way, but it is because of poor management, else we'd all be driving electric cars with 4000 mile range on a single charge by now (BTW that is not pie in the sky either).
This is why the old Garrard 301, the Empire 208, the Lenco and the Technics SP-10 all have a following. You can tweak them, and they keep up with the state of the art, no worries.
If you take a good car or good turntable from the 1960s, and outfit it with newer tweaks (vibration damping for example), many of them will perform quite nicely against the current lineup. IMO in the case of cars it should not be that way, but it is because of poor management, else we'd all be driving electric cars with 4000 mile range on a single charge by now (BTW that is not pie in the sky either).
This is why the old Garrard 301, the Empire 208, the Lenco and the Technics SP-10 all have a following. You can tweak them, and they keep up with the state of the art, no worries.