Direct Drive vs. Idler Drive vs. Belt drive

Mikelavigne,

just look under „Air Bearing“
maybe you see one the first time 😀

best
E

Right Atmasphere, if on a "proper stand" which includes the floor and everything under it, a situation most of us have no control over. On any wood joist floor you will be in trouble. Those of us on concrete slabs are lucky. I personally do not think that level of speed stability is all that important. Like distortion in amps it becomes a numbers game. But, I do not have any prolonged experience with modern DD tables. My bias comes from the unfortunately distant past. You as an audio manufacturer get a lot more opportunity to play with this stuff than I do and I do believe I am jealous of that. My life just lead me in another direction.
What tonearm would you put on the 1200G?  

@thuchan

thank you for that hint. i did see a picture of the bearing here;

https://audiocirc.com/2016/10/21/air-bearing/

looks very purposeful. it’s similar to what i had on my Rockport Sirius III. not sure about the TechDAS.

currently my CS Port LFT1 has an air bearing and the whole platter sits on an air film. it is a low flow low pressure design. i like it a lot.

Mikelavigne,

these are all airfloating designs but not using a real airbearing.
For a real airbearing you need a powerful compressor, it is 1m x 1m like the DUERR Technik. You need to put it into a separate room.

but these designs are very nice too!

best
E.

I personally think magnet floating designs like the Clearaudio and SOTA bearing are a more elegant solution for a thrust plate. As for which one is stiffer I have no idea. As Atmasphere implies the connection between the bearing and the tonearm base have to be absolutely rigid. With either the air "float" or magnet float designs there is an element of squish. So we have a trade off between bearing noise and wear vs squish and whatever that does to the reproduction of music. I would certainly think a compressor would wear out long before any top quality bearing and I have heard a number of top quality tables with standard bearings make essentially no noise that I could ascertain under normal use so to my way of thinking air bearings of any type are filigree. Opposing magnets on the other hand if stiff enough than why not?
I do find it interesting that this discussion has boiled down to derivations in belt drive designs.