"I do find you have to be careful with vpi, a lot of their changes were made to lower manufacturing costs and marketed as "better"
Though you may consider this a distinction without a difference, a number of changes may have been made to keep prices form rising, HW has maintained that it has become far more difficult (translation: expensive) to obtain the quality acrylic that was used to machine what were probably some of VPI's very best platters. Thus the return to aluminum. Yes, the original VPI platters were aluminum and lead and the movement from those platters to acrylic and lead so was widely praised that the aluminum was dropped for many, many years. Then, as now, many who used the aluminum platters sought all sorts of mats for them.
Lead was discontinued as well, though it had very favorable audible advantages: heavy weight and great damping properties. The shift here was attributed to health effects during manufacture.
And yes, marketing masters that they are, every change was promoted as improving the sound and they had the published reviews to second their promotions. And along the way they were making improvements in other ways, such as with their bearings, flywheels and speed controllers.
