Townshend Rock, or Sota... Classical music


Hello everyone,

I'm new on this forum, but I've been reading lots of extremely informative and interesting things here since a long time.

I'd like to ask a little advice... Since I'm maybe buying my first "serious" turntable. My priorities are clean and accurate reproduction, pitch stability, good detial retrieval (I listen almost only to classical music, and quite a lot of piano recordings).

I have following options:
- Townshend Rock Mk3 with Rega RB300 (maybe not in perfect condition, the clamp and the acryl platter are not perfectly even and there is always some up and down movement of cartridge and tonearm) - around 700 $
- Sota Star (with Papst DC motor) with Sumiko FT-3 tonearm, completely revised by a very experienced guy, vacuum and everything - around 1400 $
- Townshend Rock Reference with Excalibur tonearm, perfect - around 3000 $

The Rock Reference is a bit out of budget, but I may stretch to that. At the same time I'm really interested in the Sota with vacuum, since most of my records are bought second hand and... Well, I see that even the clamp of the Reference doesn't manage to make then really flat on the platter.

Or shall I go for a cheaper Japanese direct drive, like a Kenwood KD-990 or so?

Now I'm listening with a Beogram 8000 (Soundmith cart), a Technics SL-7, a Dual 721 - none of them really satisfying, expecially with piano or big, complex orchestral music. String quartets sound nice on the Beogram...

I know that everything depends also on cartridge and rest of the system - I'm keeping aroung 1000 $ for a new cart, and the rest of the system will come later, but quite soon.

Thanks for your advice!

Marco
mscili

Showing 1 response by roscoeiii

I am a huge Rock fan. The issues with the Rock 3 would concern me.

But damn, a Rock Reference. Wow. This is supposed to be a mighty fine table.

I have not heard SOTA. But I don't see the kind of raves for their tables that the Rock gets. I am not sure that the vacuum is necessarily going to deliver the types of benefits that the trough gives you on the Rock. The Townshend 7 clamp does a great job on my mildly warped records. But if warped records are an issue, I'd suggest just getting a Vinyl Flat to take care of that, and focus on other, more important aspects of turntable design than flattening LPs.