What is turntable “liveliness”.

@ghdprentice Many years ago, I was caught in the entrapment of HiFi and was an individual with an obsession. Such a mindset in my life, is no fun, and the joy is not to found in listening to music on audio equipment.

That person is long gone, and good riddance to such a waste of energy. 

I severed my usual participation in HiFi and found a way to build on a social structure around the hobby, I have been working with this attitude for over 20 years now.

I have never looked back and regularly spend time in the company of others who are quite capable to create thought provoking demo's, as a result of where their interests take them. I have been quite instrumental in encouraging investigations as well, where the end experience has been much more tan the sum of the parts..

I am pleased the passed on experience has been a info, that you feel is worthwhile learning more about.

TA is a abbreviation I use for Tonearm.  

I believe Rega tables also get tagged with the "Lively" description.  Having listened extensively to a Rega P10 with a Lyra Atlas (recently updated to lambda), this means dynamics to me. A jump factor particularly in the midrange and upper frequencies as opposed to low end groove or bass line foundation. But like many audio terms, it is easier to hear than to describe. Also, I have not listened to a LP12 in too long so I could be totally off base here.

Turntables have no sound. If they do there is something wrong with it. If the definition of "turntable" includes the tone arm and cartridge then yes. To be fair I think that is what the OP is talking about and I’m just being argumentative as usual.

Literally all a basic turntable does is spin a record at a steady enough 33 1/3 speed with low enough noise like rumble and hum. If it sounds lively it may be spinning faster. Unlikely but possible.

The placebo and expectation bias is very strong when listening to a fifty thousand dollar piece of engineering art.

The only sound turntables make that I am aware of are distortion in the form of wow and flutter and noise in the form of rumble and hum .

Otherwise anything you hear off the source material at hand comes from the cartridge and how it interacts with the tonearm. That is a combo of signal noise and distortion that can vary as well.

Put that all together and some setups may be more resolving and dynamic which I suppose could result in what could be called “liveliness” if one chooses, But otherwise it is merely a subjective adjective applied to what one hears and could mean anything to anyone.  A good setup would tend to be more lively sounding I would say.  

It's impossible to "prove" either side of this debate, because there is a subjective element that cannot be removed from the equation, although I don't know that intrinsic SQ differences among turntables (excluding the obvious differences among tonearm/cartridge pairings) that I and others hear could not be measured, if one knew what to measure.  As things stand, we can agree to disagree.