Thoughts on moving from a 1200G to Sota Saphire or above

my guess is you will hear belt drive vs direct drive differences.  you may like it better, its different.  at first when i put my belt drive table it seems like revelation, however, after a couple of hours of listening, i am hearing what I am missing and the 1200g goes back to the main table.  Ive tried this so many times that I do not anymore.  the 1200G is my table until I here something drastically better.

I’m targeting a Sapphire III with a vacuum. Also has a SME V arm. I can check it out in person and not have to risk shipping. I can see that it works properly but can’t listen to it cause a cart is not installed. 

I have a SOTA Cosmos with vac hold down done up to VI specs with the mag platter, roadrunner and condor.  I also have a JVC QLY5F with an Ort Bronze.  I use a Ort Kontrapunkt B with bob's devices on the SOTA.

As you would expect the SOTA clearly has more definition and comes from a pitch black background.  Your components are first class you should be able to easily hear the differences.

The JVC is extremely good and has been trouble free since upgraded caps done by a cool cat Ed in the West who borrowed it.  It is a fine spinner and if I had to I could easily live with it as my only player.  Not as refined as the SOTA, not as deep a background but easily lets out detail and you can deduce bad and good pressings with no problem.

The Technics is a fine spinner but depending on your tastes and inclination I believe the SOTA would be all that in your system.

Good luck and happy spinning.

1) If you want another turntable in your listening room - it’s fine, I have 6 turntables, but I only use 2 of them and they are identical (Luxman PD-444)

2) But if you’re not happy with the sound and looking for something else you’d better start buying different cartridges, not turntables!

You can also change Technics tonearm on your SL1200G, Reed tonearm would be nice (definitely better than stock Technics tonearm).

I really doubt you will be able to hear the difference between MOTORS, what you will hear is the difference between tonearms.

You can see many different cartridges, tonearms, turntables in my SYSTEM ONE and in my SYSTEM TWO here on audiogon in virtual system galleries. My next stop after several Technics turntables was Luxman PD-444, then Victor TT-101, then Denon DP-80 ... 

My experience has been that upgrades beyond that of an SL1200G or in my case GAE are possible, but the increments are disproportionate to cost.  I have a VPI HW-40, and yes it sounds better but only a little bit better.  Hard to justify the cost delta.  I am sure the same would be true for the Sota.  I agree with those who have suggested better cartridges and better arms.  Start with cartridges.