Townshend Rock, or Sota... Classical music


Hello everyone,

I'm new on this forum, but I've been reading lots of extremely informative and interesting things here since a long time.

I'd like to ask a little advice... Since I'm maybe buying my first "serious" turntable. My priorities are clean and accurate reproduction, pitch stability, good detial retrieval (I listen almost only to classical music, and quite a lot of piano recordings).

I have following options:
- Townshend Rock Mk3 with Rega RB300 (maybe not in perfect condition, the clamp and the acryl platter are not perfectly even and there is always some up and down movement of cartridge and tonearm) - around 700 $
- Sota Star (with Papst DC motor) with Sumiko FT-3 tonearm, completely revised by a very experienced guy, vacuum and everything - around 1400 $
- Townshend Rock Reference with Excalibur tonearm, perfect - around 3000 $

The Rock Reference is a bit out of budget, but I may stretch to that. At the same time I'm really interested in the Sota with vacuum, since most of my records are bought second hand and... Well, I see that even the clamp of the Reference doesn't manage to make then really flat on the platter.

Or shall I go for a cheaper Japanese direct drive, like a Kenwood KD-990 or so?

Now I'm listening with a Beogram 8000 (Soundmith cart), a Technics SL-7, a Dual 721 - none of them really satisfying, expecially with piano or big, complex orchestral music. String quartets sound nice on the Beogram...

I know that everything depends also on cartridge and rest of the system - I'm keeping aroung 1000 $ for a new cart, and the rest of the system will come later, but quite soon.

Thanks for your advice!

Marco
mscili
Since a few weeks I wanted to come back here and thank again everyone for the advice in August. After auditioning the Sota, after thinking a lot, I went for the Rock Reference. The Sota didn't have the same solidity and effortlessness in complex musical passages (of course, this may be depending on cartridges and tonearms too) and it was tonally less coherent. The Rock Reference makes a cheap Technics MM cartridge (with Jico SAS stylus) sound totally different and incredibly much better than other turntables. But of course the next step will be a new cart... Maybe even a not so expensive AT-OC9 could be a good idea, since I feel that the Reference is probably never going to sound harsh and to suffer from resonances in the higher end of the frequency range.

I'll see. In the meantime, thanks for the advice and a nice Christmas time to everyone!
Congratulations. You made a legendary purchase. A very rare and great table. You will find it will also make some noise on some records much more tolerable.
mscili---If you at some point in the future decide to sell the Rock Ref, contact me!