If you were looking for a direct drive turntable ...

I have moved on from Belt Drive and Idler Drive, but still retain these TT Drives to use at my leisure.

I also have the opportuniity to listen to a SME Belt Drive, Linn Belt Drive and Garrard and Lenco Idler Drives in other systems.

Today I use a DD as my main TT and others I know have swapped out their Belt Drive TT's to be superseded by DD in their systems.

Taking the Drive out of the equation, there are other areas where the DD wins over.

The DD has in many cases especially on the models being refferred to, exceptional speed control built in.

Other Drive systems can cost much more to achieve a speed control that is with similar desirability.

An Idler Drive can easily have a Standalone Speed Control that commands a $1000+ and Belt Drives have had many add on ancillaries to improve Speed Control at similar asking prices. 

This is one of the reasons I became interested in a DD.

After hearing a DD in A/B comparisons to a owned and well respected Idler Drive,

I became a convert to the DD and have not looked back.   

mijostyn

I am happy to report, my friend/neighbor/music producer and I listened for 4 hours and we could not entice the piano to sing.

we agreed with you, it must be doing something, but try as we may, could hear no sound emanating from it. he walked here, there, bent, stretched behind, ...

I thought, lets get blasting, and hit pause. the magnets stop the speakers rapidly, but the piano would keep singing. nope.

lucky is all I can say.

....................................

meanwhile, I had kept my tweeter's l-pads too low, he heard that readily, I adjusted, them speck by speck, he listened, then the slight compression he heard was gone, he pronounced the sound, imaging, depth excellent, and suspected when I checked the next day with the sound meter that I would find we raised the tweeters 2db.

sure enough, I simply perfected the Left tweeter's L pad a speck to match the right one with specific frequency bands from the GRP/Carver Test CD.

Listening a great deal the next day, I realized my mistake, and it's more than subtle effect.

While the meter was showing the level of the 16k band which I surprisingly heard, I thought, if I, 73 year old ears, can hear 16k, then it must be too high for Donna and younger ears. So, I lowered the L-Pad to reduce the tweeters (by about 2db is turned out).

What I didn't think about, didn't realize: the SPL I was hearing did not correlate to the SPL of the Meter. I heard 16k surprisingly well, but I think it is fair to say not as well as the meter.

Thinking/Listening the next day, duh, I wasn't just erroneously avoiding 'too much tweeter', I was causing some compression, because it reduced both the volume and time decay of the overtones of the upper mids.

The Eurythmics, Andreas Vollenwider, Blue Nile are full of splendid highs and the overtones of lower notes I had cut off. 

What a gift to have my friends ears.

I agree, the best isolation solution is a wall mount for your turntable, but I feared drilling anchors into our apartment wall. We got a set of adjustabe sorbothane isolation turntable feet here, Turntable Phonograph Vinyl Record Player lsolation Feet – Mnpctech

As an addition to my previous post, the DD TT has other benefits in the daily maintenace department.

A DD TT,  Set into a Plinth that has a properties that are not effected by the ambient environment in the place of the set up for the Source Components, has a capability to maintain a set up that does not generate a concern over long periods of time.

The Chassis > Spindle Housing > Plinth are all Rigidly Fastened.

A DD TT design that allows for a Tonearm to be inserted into the same Plinth Material, allows for this Part to be Rigidly Fastened to the Plinth, hence decoupled from the Chassis is beneficial, as well as being able to maintain a very accurate alignment for the long term to the Platter Spindle.

For a end user this set up is very easy to maintain and offers many reassurances that critical parts are maintained at their optimum at the interfaces, especially if the Plinth Material is known to be unchanging in different ambient conditions.

An added consideration is how the Plinth Material Dissipates and Damps energy Transferred to it.  

Other TT Drives and in certain cases the designs produced around them do not allow for this simplicity of set up as offered from a DD TT.

A design with multiple components used at interfaces will potentially need fetling/ tweaking on a regular basis, as changes will be occurring at the interfaces, and SQ will again potentially be perceived as inconsistent and at certain times undesirable.

.    

@lewm 

Pioneer did make a very high quality line of DD turntables back in the day, topped by the nonpareil Exclusive P3,
 

There's been one for sale on CAM located in Canada less the 30 plus %

exchange rate. But not on my buying list.