New Townshend Rock 7 owner

of coarse this assumes that the tt feet are tightened up as far as can go to the plinth.

Happy listening

Some of you may be interested in how the trough produces the substantial reduction in bearing rumble and motor noise (i.e in the 20- 80Hz region) it does.

It's because the stylus 'sees' this noise coming from both the plane of the platter/record and from that of the deck of the headshell above it, 180 degrees opposed or 'mirrored' to the platter, hence there's a net phase-cancellation.

This isn't just theory - there's an article by Max Townshend floating around somehwere with measurements and spectrograms (with/without damper) - the reduction in spurious LF is not trivial. Many people have noticed and remarked on the quiet or 'dark' background produced by the various Rocks.

That's just gravy though - the real benefits are in the stability imparted by this removal of spurious LF at the stylus (effectively, locking together of cartridge and platter from 20Hz upwards) - improvement in bass fidelity, tracing and tracking, etc' etc'.

Not forgetting the almost entire elimination of arm-cartridge resonance, of course.

@bdp24, Did you ever buy the Mark Baker belt for your table? I've found a material that I'm using as a (mat) that surprisingly, works very well on my Rock 7 @ my VPI.

Slaw, I contacted Mark, and he unfortunately doesn't make the round-profile belt the Elite version (Mk.2) of the Rock uses. I got myself an HW-19 Mk.2 (acrylic armboard and platter platform) to play with until a Rock 7 comes my way. I may end up putting a Trans-Fi Terminator on it, as it is suppose to work unusually well with London/Decca pick-ups.