I will say that Jeff at Audiomods is one of the best folks out there in this hobby. What you get is worth every dollar, pound, or euro you give him. Actually Jeff just agreed to build me a 10.5 inch arm for my MC2000 cartridge that will be in the single digits of mass. A one off build from his inventory of parts and his fabrication skills. No one else will do this.
I would say the Classic is a great choice for an affordable arm, and the Systemdeck is a better table than its given cedit for. If I recall Audionote bought the rights to the Systemdeck and was their first table offering. The following excerpt is from an Audionote dealer site.
The Audio Note TT1 is based on the award winning Dunlop Systemdeck IIX. Audio Note have taken its basic design and improved on it in a number of areas.
The Audio Note TT1 has a fully floating, three point, level-adjustable suspended sub-chassis that isolates the platter and arm from the outer chassis, motor, and shelf or support.
The Audio Note TT1 platter and sub-platter are individually machined from a single block of acrylic. The platter has a label-sized recess on its top to accommodate the record’s label and a wider recess on the bottom, providing clearance for the pulley system. One of the reasons that acrylic is used is that it has some similar properties to vinyl itself so that when a record is placed on top of it, it acts like a mechanical extension of the record. Therefore, with this kind of platter, no mat should be used.