High mass vs Low Mass Turntables - Sound difference?

No one is suggesting there has to be a choice between high mass and low mass designs. Those are just design concepts. There are obviously a lot of variables and parameters involved. Mass is only one of them. You got your spring and unstrung designs. Belt drive vs direct drive. Tangential vs radial tracking. Vacuum hold down. What have you. And there are a great many successful turntables including magnetic levitation and air bearing everything that tend to actually eliminate the whole variable of MASS. The best way to solve for a set of simultaneous equations in many unknowns is start eliminating the unknowns. Obviously also, not matter what design concept is employed in a turntable the performance of that turntable can be easily and reliably improved by vibration isolation. I don't think any list of great turntables would be complete with Linn, Walker, Maplenoll, Verdier, AC Raven, Caliburn Continuum, VPI, SOTA, Basis, and a bunch more I probably forgot.

Compare this with anything mentioned in posts
Anvilturntables.com

Sorbothane is an excellent damping plastic material (another type of plastic polymer). I would agree that a heavy turntable with constrained layer damping or with sorbothane plastic footers will be an improvement on just a heavy turntable alone. 

Note I never said that damping is not good with turntables. I only said that high mass turntables perform better than low mass turntables in my experience. I suspect that very light weight plastic-based material turntables are  just cheap products that are inexpensive to make and low cost to ship. A heavy weight turntable requires commensurate shipping materials and even a crate. 

I maintain that light weight turntables are of greatest benefit to the manufacturer and retailer rather than the end user - cheap to make and a light weight plater can run on a cheaper smaller motor, cheaper to package and ship too.

From the Sorbothane Wikipedia page,

"Sorbothane exhibits many of the properties of rubber, silicone, and other elastic polymers. It is considered to be a good vibration damping material, an acoustic insulator, and highly durable. An unusually high amount of the energy from an object dropped onto Sorbothane is absorbed. The feel and damping qualities of Sorbothane have been likened to those of meat."

The last sentence caught my eye. Has anyone thought about using meat under components or speakers? One suspects Spam might be the cost benefit champion. Span in a can already has a constrained layer constrained - the can. But there probably isn’t a real substitute for Filet Mignon. Why use a synthetic when you can use the real McCoy?  It’s in the meat!

Yes, meat.  Highly underrated, lol.  I think at some point value becomes the determining factor for many. Spending 3-5k on chipboard, plastic and glass seems a stretch when compared to mass design approaches.