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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.

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hiho

Showing 2 responses by mikelavigne

mikelavigne
2,200 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.

i've been living with the active air suspension and air bearing of the direct drive Rockport for 8 years and could not agree with you more. mass only takes things so far; ultimately any gounded tt will become a seismograph as it attains higher and higher levels of detail and tells you about how the earth sounds.

OTOH high mass plinths do yield very high performance overall. (of course, the Rockport has a 250 pound plinth, along with air suspension).

the Dobbins Technics SP-10 Mk3 with the 'naked' plinth (110 pounds) and the Dobbins Garrard 301 (80 pounds) are sitting on the decoupled Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack with Formula shelves. the GPA does offer a fairly effective passive decoupling that seems to work with these tt's. but more sophisticated active suspension would likely take things up a notch in refinement and low level detail.

i have pondered how a Halcyonics or Herzan Stable Table would do under the Mk3 or 301. would that added benefit get it closer to the Rockport?
mikelavigne
2,200 posts
 
Dertonarm, i'm not surprised with your experience with isolation such as the Vibraplane and Minus-K. i will be very interested in your audition of the Halcyonics. 4 years ago i had a Halcyonics in my room for an evening and it was very eye openning hearing the effect on my digital transport and preamp. i only had my 600 pound Rockport at the time so i did not have a chance to try it under a tt.

btw, you likey would enjoy this tutorial about SOTA active isolation from the Herzon site. read all 6 pages. it mentions and compares the best passive isolation such as the Minus-K and air suspension to the current active technology.
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