Mat Material...............

Richardmr, I'd recommend that you contact Audiogon member 4yanx about this. He has quite a bit of listening experience with Nottinghams and variations and tweaks. I think he could give a more accurate recommendation than I could.

Some people like the maple, and in general I think that a good hardwood like maple would be less harsh than HDF. I think it would be worth a try. I think that the HDF platter is probably a little harsh too, but the SpaceMat is supposed to take care of that problem.

What kind of sonic change are you seeking, or feel the need to address?

Hard platter upon stylus exerting pressure, which is modulated by the groove, becomes microvibration that hits the hard platter surface, and bounces back. The 'microscopic chatter' will add a haze of noise to the music, and also affects all the 'audiophile qualities' (soundstage, tonality, extension, etc). To ride the chattering vibration, the cartridge/tonearm has suspension and damping, but this occurs quite far away from the source of the chattering. Imagine that most of the effect are 2nd order mathematically - so even the stylus suspension that is one cantilever away, the Young's module of the cantilever comes to play, as can be proven by fancy hollowed-boron, diamond-coated, and other science to inmprove rigidity.

The ringing platter (metal, glass) solution rather than dealing with the microvibration, they try to conduct away the vibration energy to the plinth (ground), in the process, they introduce some rining artifact. Having precision bearing and platter faciliate the grouding effect.

The hard surface, where some comments as lacking in PRAT - could be the result that energy modulated by the prior music passage becomes the residue to the current music passage (I am currently involved with designing amplifier with 5Mhz feedback vs. conventional 10ms feedback, and it's a revealation.. but that's another story...)

Felt is a material that avoids the 2 hard surface bouncing energy back/forth, but the problems are the slip in horizontal plane and vertical variation accorss the wool pile.

Then we come up with the clamp - more interesting, it exerts higher pressure near the spindle and the edge of the record will elevate, plus, by having variation in pressure, the reflection of energy between vinyl and hard platter is now uneven.

Should you worry about the above? Perhaps not, as the VTA is probably off, or the VTF is not optimal, and the tonearm azimuth is probably mounted off, and the cable has more oxide that creates a lot of thermal noise.

Add to the fact that the records playe on the turntable are cut 10-100x more inaccurate than the precision platter/bearing.....

Uh oh. Another opened can of worms.

TWL, and others, thanks.

By the way, anyone hear the AVID Volvare. My retailer loves it. But with an arm and cart it would be minimum $5500 new. Would it really better a Nottingham Interspace with a Dynavector Karat? Its almost 3k more.

Richard, I have heard that Avid table only once so I cannot give great detail without blowing smoke (though that doesn't stop quite a number on this board). I am not partial to the sprung subchassis tables, in general, at that price point. I will say that the Avid Volvare WILL definitely best the Interspace by a significant margin. $3K better? That I will leave to the opinion of others.

Richard, I responded to you personally with respect to the Mystic Mat.

Boston Audio makes a mat that is cut from a solid cylinder of graphite and ground/polished/sealed to extremely close tolerances. I wish I had a couple extra hundred to throw around to try one out, myself. Someone asked about it awhile back and got no response. I checked out the link and then did some networking and I have received reports of good success with these on 'Nots, Michels, and VPI. Would like to hear of other reports.