Turntable for life


I know the question has been asked before but it’s worth asking again. Many change equipment frequently, but have you found your turntable for life?  One that you’ve had for years and still pleases you so much you are going to keep it forever? Price is irrelevant--it can be 300 Dollars or 30.000 Dollars 
fabsound

Showing 3 responses by lewm

First of all, I am not claiming that any of my "lifetime" turntables (plural) is "the best".  I can only say that I've arrived at a place where I feel no urge ever to make major changes.  I own 5 turntables, but my lifetime keepers in no particular order are:  (1) Technics SP10 Mk3 chassis mounted in 100-lb slate and wood plinth incorporating an Albert-Porter-designed damper block on its bearing and the Krebs mod; (2) Kenwood L07D; (3) Lenco L75 mounted on PTP3 in slate plinth with "Jeremy" Superbearing and heavily dampened but stock platter.  The latter using my own tiptoed Del Monte Mandarin Orange slices in water footers.  No belt-drives here. If there were, it would probably be a Kronos.
You read correctly, Peter.  Of course, my way of describing them is meant for laughs, but I do use small cans of Mandarin Orange slices in water (sealed, of course) for footers on both my Lenco and my Denon DP80, which also sits in a slate plinth.  I use 3 such cans per turntable.  On the bottom side of each can I have affixed a Black Diamond Racing tiptoe, so that the can contacts the shelf via the tiptoe which in turn contacts only the top of the can, not the circumferential raised ridge, the idea being that energy coming up into the can would more readily vibrate the thin metal bottom of the can, which energy would then enter the internal milieu and be dissipated.  Ideally, I would put another tiptoe on top, between the can and the slate slab, but I've never gotten around to it because the footers "work" fine as is.  The idea is that energy traveling in either direction will be absorbed and dissipated in jiggly the contents of the can.  Having some unevenly distributed solid matter (the orange slices) floating in the water further should help dissipate energy (entropy, you know).  FWIW, sauer kraut might work too.  Probably canned peas too.  But I like Mandarin orange slices, so I figured going in that if I did not like the footers, I could eat the contents.  At $2 per foot plus tiptoes I had lying around, it was a low cost solution.  Further, if you remove the paper label, the naked cans with their circumferential rings look rather Art Deco-ish.
To me, a nutcase is someone who spends hundreds or thousands of dollars on footers without looking at or thinking about the physics of what a footer needs to do and how the problem might be approached using readily available materials. But yes; I suppose I'm a nutcase for other reasons, like having 5 turntables.

i might add that once I committed to create the slates for the lenco and the denon, I needed also to have feet that were tall enough to keep the chassis from touching the shelf.