Vintage DD turntables. Are we living dangerously?

The TT-81 and TT-71 use the same CORE motor. The 81 uses more sophisticated electronic drive than the 71.

Now, the TT-101 is a completely different beast. It uses a CORELESS motor and a "double bi-directional servo" in the electronics. So it is no surprise that Aigenga prefers the 101 over the 81. I have no experience with the 81 nor 101 but I have owned other JVC models and every time I prefer the ones with the coreless motor and even my non-audiophile friends noticed the coreless tables sound "smoother." It has a distinctive fluidity in the sound that's recognizable. I would LOVE to hear a TT-101.

Much information can be found at the invaluable The Vintage Knob site.

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Hiho, FWIW, that's the first thing I noticed once I got my L07D up and running, an uncanny sense of "fluidity" (good word for what I hear), plus the L07D's signal to noise ratio seems to be unusually low, which adds to that same sense. The turntable gets out of the way, and the music is just "there".

An update on the recapping of my TT-101. I just spoke with the tech and he says that he will only be changing out the caps in the power supply section, not all of the small ones on the regulation boards. His take is that the large ones should be changed from time to time but the tiny ones will not cause any problems.
Anybody have a point of view on that?

Aigenga, I can tell you this: the main thing that causes speed stability problems is not bad caps but dirty speed selection switches and dirty speed controls. So if you have a variable speed feature this is the first place to look.

Radio Shack makes an excellent contact cleaner that is about as strong as you would want to put on any audio components. A quick shot of that stuff, and work the control back and forth, and its likely that speed stability is restored.

BTW, some machines that lack an external control may well still have an internal control. Figuring out which one it is and cleaning it is a slightly more complex task. At any rate I would not worry about on-board caps so much as I would filter caps in the power supply!

Occasionally certain parts get identified as trouble makers. I've seen a lot of tantalum electrolytics short out over the years. These days if I see them I don't trust them no matter where they are.

"Small ones" does not tell me much. Some electrolytic caps in solid state devices can have values as low as one microfarad and below. Such caps are tiny, but they are nevertheless electrolytic. If they are electrolytic it would seem to me they are subject to aging, leakage, etc. I would change them all, and I did so in my own SP10 MK2. If the term "small ones" refers to film and foil or metallized film capacitors, that is a different story. Film caps are also "small", but they have a very long life and don't really need to be changed unless grossly bad. That's what I think.