Reason for buying old/classic turntables

I replaced my Well-Tempered Reference Table with a Technics SP-10 MK II because the Technics is better. I wasn't being fashionable, cute or nostalgic.

As Mike suggested above, the Japanese DD tables of the late seventies and early eighties were statement products whose R&D was subsidized by the sale of millions of mass market tables. There is no such subsidy today and no investor could hope for a return on investment in sales of comparable products today.
The EPA 100 tonearm on that SL-1000 MK II table in the ad you guys are talking about, was Harry Pearson's reference arm for years and still competes favorably with much of what is for sale today. It is probably worth $1000 all by itself. It has 20 highly polished rubies in use as ball bearings and utilizes a very clever dynamic balance adjustment so that it can be used with any cartridge regardless of compliance.

The engineers who designed and built this stuff were every bit as capable as today's garage tinkerer's. They don't receive the same publicity, of course, because they are not being advertised in the review magazines and they cannot be stocked by high volume dealers.

The implicit superiority of modern product is mythology at its best.

Chris Brady took his Teres belt-drive turntable designs to the pinnacle of the industry by word of mouth with very little review assistance. They were that good. But Chris found that he had reached a plateau with belt-drive and that he could only move forward significantly by developing a state of the art direct drive design. His Certus turntable is arguably the best modern turntable currently available. Still there are those who could buy it and choose vintage tables instead. I think the original poster wants to know why.

And I think I know what other vintage table T-bone is seeking.

The classic car/classic turntable comparison doesn't really work. Statement products and R&D breakthroughs are always subsidized by the sales of mass market product or government funding. Automobiles have continued, until very recently, to benefit from high volume sales of mass market product. Turntables haven't enjoyed that, or any, subsidy since early in the 1980s.

Automobile manufacturers are multi-billion dollar businesses, while a company like Teres is almost hobby in nature. Chris has a full time job and remarkably has brought Teres into existence in his spare time. Look at the comparison of resources demonstrated by this example and then bring in an industry giant like VPI. Both companies have accomplished a great deal in the way of innovation but neither one brings in enough money per annum to pay the utility bill for one month at any Ford plant.

There just isn't any comparison at all. If the turntable biz was as well funded as the auto biz, I'm sure the turntables of today would completely eclipse the vintage products we all love but the resources and incentives have not been sufficient to stimulate that kind of progress. For that reason, the oldies still hold their own nicely despite comments to the contrary by those who benefit from trafficking in new product and reviewing it.

Ketchup -

The old Garrard, Thorens, Lenco, and even the SP-10 were really designed to go into a console of some kind. Some were used in your parents' fruitwood console and some were used in radio station consoles. Not everything from that period of time is revered today, just the statement stuff like Empire and the professional tools like those mentioned above.

All of the tables under discussion pre-date high end audio as we know it and they certainly predate the use of booming, self-powered subs in small rooms. I'm not sure that they needed the isolation required today.

In any event, it isn't really about absolute best performance. The vintage stuff is great because it is still reasonably affordable and you can't say that about comparable modern stuff.

Audiofeil sells new turntables that have to compete with the vintage units. That seems like motivation for bias.

And I do have a clue.

I don't have the technical knowledge, tactile skills or financial wherewithal to push against the upward boundaries of the state of the art. So I get as close as I can by leveraging "bang for the buck". In turntables I have found that goal best served by the use of high end vintage drive systems. I'm not sure the same can be accomplished with tonearms but my EPA 100 does very well and it was already on the table. Even if this stuff isn't as good as the very best of modern product, the fact that we are even having this debate proves that they are worthy contenders.

If you would rather have a new state of the art table and can afford one, I don't mind if you buy it. That Technics SL-1000 MK II for $3000 will wipe the floor with any new table and arm combo costing that much.

Apples to apples - let's keep it real.