The urge to tinker is awash. What TT might better mine and why?

Both my TT use the Trans-Fi arm, which is going back into production.

Why not stay with Tom Fletcher's sound?

When I heard the spacedeck (1997), I ordered the Mentor (now Dais). It is notably superior. Pear Audio is also a Fletcher design. I also have the Wave Mechanic power supply - another improvement.

IMO the tonearms were always a weak point, because of limited adjustability. The Trans-Fi Terminator tonearm also works superbly with NA. Don't know if it's still available - you could try.

You ask why.

I suggest that it depends on your taste. If you can’t stand wow and flutter, get a direct drive. They tend to control that very well. Personally, I don’t find wow and flutter nearly as offensive as tizzy digital-type sound.

If you can’t stand tizzy, try a premium belt drive. I suspect that tizzy comes from higher frequency speed variations, which can be audible if you listen carefully. The thrust bearing on a DD can be a noise generator - yes, even the best. At a recent trade event, the big new Technics was being demo-ed. They had a motor assembly on display, so I picked it up and turned the spindle. I could hear the bearing (teflon PTFE variant) - not loud, but it was there.

And compared to my NA and my air bearing, to me the sound (of music) was tizzy. Just like my Technics SL150(2) - set up with an air bearing tonearm, so that I could swap out wands and cartridges in known-perfect alignment, for comparison with my other tables in my own system.

Now try turning the spindle of a NA Dais bearing. Silence. Try that with an air bearing. Silence. I conclude that bearing noise is the source of tizzy, solving the mystery (to me) of why I didn’t like DD - and why, incidentally, one needs a bearing which is silent both axially and radially.

If you have perfect pitch and can’t abide even a hint of wow, get a CD player instead.

It's not incompatible, IMO, but I've never seen it done. I'd like to. Bear in mind that there are two sources of friction and noise: thrust, which is obvious, and radial to stabilize the platter. Even some air bearing turntables don't bother with radial, and the challenges of going contactless with DD, with any economy at all, seem daunting.

I have heard of the partial maglev technology, and even thought of using it in my DIY, but it's still a case by case thing, the devil being in the details. I've never heard of maglev used radially - sounds impossible to me. So we are left with two surfaces in contact, therefore a potential for noise, and I think that plastic bearings tend to produce noise.

Bottom line to me is whether there is bearing noise and whether it is imparted to the platter. I think that any bearing noise is transmitted, and hypothesize that it's the source of tizzy digital type sound. What are your views of the results of a bearing noise which is audible?

@markmendenhall personally i love the Nott sound and didn’t want to get away from it, so I just got ‘more of it’

Yep. And air bearings are yet more of the same. I much prefer the ’sound’ of really good bearings to anything else, regardless of the touted advantages of this technology or that.

@markmendenhall 

Agree 100%.