Measuring turntable speed

Cousinbilly, you are absolutely right. You have to be able to measure the speed with the record playing which big_greg's device will do. I have the Road Runner on my SOTA so I can compare big_greg's device to that and use it to check the SME. Hard to go wrong for $15.00.
As an aside, is turntable speed all that important. I think not as important as speed variations like wow and flutter. The absolute speed could be off 1 or 2% and most of us myself included would not know. The only time I ever noticed it was when I was synchronizing the turntable with the computer to compare digital vs analog versions of the same record.  

As an aside, is turntable speed all that important. I think not as important as speed variations like wow and flutter. The absolute speed could be off 1 or 2% and most of us myself included would not know.

For once we agree on something!

How many here are going to claim they can hear the difference between 33.30 and 33.40 say as long as speed is constant?

I know I cannot......

Have a great day!

https://i.imgur.com/Lo0LYl1.jpg
This is good enough for me and the DIN standardisation. 3150 complete sine waves in one second. Is more than a strobe disc can ever do. And the lack of the high granularity we can not get the speed variation either. Now we get graphs with the better resolution.

Regarding the lathe machine speed accuracy precision. It starts to get more silly and pointless the more number 3:s we add to the end of 33.3xxx.

And yes we measure with the diamond in the groove. That someone asked.

Aiwa PL-3000 has rock solid speed control. Very hard to get hold of. 
Technics SL-M3 also good on speed control . Almost rock solid speed all the way. Another rare turntable .

Got it. It is called the DT-2234+ digital tachometer. Comes in a little blue soft case with 3 10" strips of reflective tape and a 9 volt battery.
Accuracy is said to be +- 0.1 RPM. Works as advertised and sure beats messing around with strobe lights plus you can measure with the record playing.