What direction is VPI headed?

Thanks slaw, there’s nothing like experience with a design for over twenty years! I got rid of all my rubber isolation products for the very reason you cite, but kept one set of the SIMS just in case. I’m going to give your roller bearing idea a try, but with the bearings sitting directly on the shelf the HW-19 sits on, rather than in the corners of the table’s base. That base will then serve only to hold the motor, and provide aesthetic appeal to the table.

I have been using DH Golden Sound ceramic cones under my Townshend Rock table in place of the stock Sorbothane half-spheres. I also have the Townshend base and dust cover for the table, which comes with a thin bottom panel on which the spheres sit. I cut out the bottom panel, to disconnect the table from the base/dust cover. The HW-19 will be the same. I just bought a set of Townshend Seismic Pods to put in place of the DH cones under the Rock, so my Elite will now have the same degree of isolation as your Rock Mk.7, which comes with the Pods as feet. Brilliant design!

A table without a removable armboard? What if, like myself, one doesn’t care for unipivot arms? There are a lot of older VPI tables out there that DO have a separate arm board, and they’re pretty cheap to buy. VPI can do whatever they want, no one has to follow.

The HW-19, and the TNT after it, became, because of their stability and relatively (for the time) high mass, became THE table for straight-tracking arms, which demand a very stable platform (unaffected by the mass of the arm moving across the LP, which greatly impacts the table's center-of-gravity) to operate optimally. For users of such arms (the Eminent Technology is still a great arm, and the more recent TransFi Terminator a fantastic arm at a bargain price), there are plenty of those tables around. And, they were built to last!