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What is turntable “liveliness”.

I have listened to turntables for sixty years. I bought my first high end TT about thirty years… it was revelatory. I do not swap tables often. I do a huge amount of research and then stay with one for fifteen years or so. My most recent upgrade was from a VPI Aries (heavy mass) to a Linn LP12 (light weight, sprung)…very nearly the very top level. Could we please not turn this into a religious thing about Linn… mine is an outstanding TT which compares favorably with any other $45K analog leg (TT, cartridge, and Phonostage)

The term lively comes up in descriptions. One of the differences in character I noticed between the VPI and Linn… which I thought might be considered liveliness was to me a bit of what I perceived as the images very slightly jumping around… the kind of thing you would think of when you see films of “The Flash” maybe vibrating in place. While I found this gave me the feeling of the notes wanting to jump out at me, I found it a bit disconcerting. I attributed it to a relatively light weight rig, that is really good at rejecting low frequency vibrations (it is a sprung table… known to be lively sounding) up to a relatively high frequency… but beyond that not. Something a really heavy rig would not be effected by.

 

To test my theory, I had a Silent Running Ohio Class vibration platform constructed for my turntable. The image smear, as I called it disappeared. There is no smear and it has great solidity.

Is this attribute “liveliness”?

ghdprentice

Showing 3 responses by mapman

mapman's avatar
mapman
21,865 posts
 

@ghdprentice yep I am only a few years behind you. I bought my Linn Axis in the mid 80s in order to preserve my sizable investment in records at the time when CDs broke. I’ve bought many more albums since. They are fun to collect. In recent years I play a record once and convert to digital for my digital music library. I added Qobuz recently and have not played a record since, though I still have many records not available on Qobuz that will surely get played again. It’s all good. Who ever said what we do has to be rational? There is still no real substitute for being able to hold a record sleeve in your hand. 👍

mapman's avatar
mapman
21,865 posts
 

It’s a 100+ year old technology.  People keep throwing money at the problems trying to mitigate them all as best as possible.  It’s prettty insane!  Go digital streaming!    Much less problematic and way more versatile.  

mapman's avatar
mapman
21,865 posts
 

The only sound turntables make that I am aware of are distortion in the form of wow and flutter and noise in the form of rumble and hum .

Otherwise anything you hear off the source material at hand comes from the cartridge and how it interacts with the tonearm. That is a combo of signal noise and distortion that can vary as well.

 

Put that all together and some setups may be more resolving and dynamic which I suppose could result in what could be called “liveliness” if one chooses, But otherwise it is merely a subjective adjective applied to what one hears and could mean anything to anyone.  A good setup would tend to be more lively sounding I would say.  

 

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