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want new plinth ideas for direct-drive turntables


By now, the idler-drive genre has enough ink on them without me adding anything new to the topic. What is little talked about is the "guts" of direct-drive tables. Many vintage DD units suffered from bad plinth design with inadequate solidity (often mounted to crappy plastic or flimsy particle-board) and inadequate isolation from resonance and interference of electronics.

I like the bare bone approach, that is, to take the motor out of the chassis/plinth/enclosure and mount it to a something solid, material of your own choice, and extend the cable by at least couple feet to the stock chassis or an enclosure that contains the electronics/motor-drive/control-console/power-supply. In fact, the Monaco Grand-Prix, Teres Certus, or early Micro-Seiki DDX/DQX-1000 takes the same approach.

Almost ALL DD tables can be improved this way. There are many other brands of superb DD tables with great potential out there can be had for very reasonable price and can be converted this way with good result. I no longer have any Technics tables on hand to experiment but I still got great results with some mid-priced JVC, Pioneer, Kenwood, Yamaha, etc... I haven't tried it on Sony and Denon tables yet because they require mounted a tapehead to check platter speed so the mounting is tricky. Modern belt-drive turntables have been doing similar things by separating the motor from the main plinth. Once again, Micro-Seiki was ahead of their time with their RX-1500 and beyond. It's only logical DD will go that direction. The days of having everything in a box for DD tables seems less attractive to me now.

If you have other ideas, feel free to talk about it here. And hopefully this will generate more new interest in the DD genre. Personally I am more interested in people's experience with brands other than Technics as they already got enough coverage in other forums and threads. Nothing against Technics, just want to direct attention to other sleepers out there. Anyway, still feel free to share ideas.

_________
hiho

Showing 3 responses by dertonarm

dertonarm
1,042 posts
 
I know its not popular, but go and try once for heaven's sake a plinth which is suspended with low resonance frequency - below 3Hz.
It is not the plinth weight, composition or raw material - isolate it from any outside vibration and your eyes will pop wide open how the sound and stability change for an unknown quality.
dertonarm
1,042 posts
 
Mikelavigne, I have seen (rather: heard...) both the Minus-K and Vibraplane changing the performance of Micro RX-5000, TW Acustic Raven AC 2, Platine Verdier and VPI TNT all for the better. I would recommend adding a suitable active or passive isolation platform underneath ANY turntable which has not a built-in low frequency suspension (frankly - the Platine Verdier did benefit only very minor from the Vibraplane as it's own suspension works - if aligned well - pretty good).
I will soon have the opportunity to audition the Halyconics in a familiar top-flight set-up.
I will report, whether it's performance does exceed the Minus-K or Vibraplane.
dertonarm
1,042 posts
 
Mikelavigne, thank you very much for the Herzon link. I really appreciate it. I'll keep you posted with the Halcyonics.
Cheers,
D.
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