Marc,
>>...as a direct drive advocate yourself, together with an ever increasing band of followers, do you feel that direct drive (or idler drive) if implemented correctly will always trump belt drive, or as belt drive advocates argue that it is a synergy of everything being well engineered, speed stability being important but not totally decisive over the whole package (materials, isolation, motor quality)?<<
Keep in mind, I am not specifically an advocate of direct drive. There were plenty of bad DD TTs made; frankly most did not sound very good. It was easier to make a reasonably good sounding belt drive inexpensively than it was to make a good sounding cheap DD TT. I settled on a particular DD TT that was exceedingly well implemented. Each drive technology has attributes and sonic character that can be right and musically persuasive, if the TT is designed and built well. The cliche' characterizations that belt drive sounds relaxed (but lazy), direct drive sounds energetic but brittle and idler drive sounds vivid and dynamic but is noisy and erratic have some truths in their origins, but instances of each violate the generalizations, as the aging Luxman PD444 refutes standard criticism of DD.
Today, you can spend anywhere from a few hundred dollars to the price of a house on a turntable. It's hard to recommend without knowing where in that cost continuum your appetite to spend lies. The top end of the market, like so much of high-end hifi, is unmoored from a sense of proportion. After all, the vinyl LP medium itself is not only quite flawed, but even now, specialty production of vinyl LPs yields *highly* variable quality. So is it worth having a $150,000 turntable? Is it worth building a turntable foundation into your house, anchored to bedrock via caissons -- rendering your turntable in part a stethescope on the planet? Only someone who is prepared to allocate resources at that level to spin a vinyl disc guaranteed to not be flat or perfectly concentric can say whether its worth the spend to them. A lot of the five and six figures machine shop exhibitionist turntables I've heard don't convince me, but then the Continuum Caliburn proves a lot of cash can be well spent on spinning and tracking a $20 disc.
TW, Walker, DaVinci, Kuzma, many others have highly credible turntables that are departures from the decades-old AR/Linn/Thorens suspended chassis belt drive architecture. You can't possibly hear all of them comparatively, nor own even a representative sample today. Again, I prefer to keep thing simple. If I were buying today to replace my Luxmans, my short list:
Brinkmann Oasis -- no need to look further for DD. It's as perfectly implemented as it gets.
47 Labs Koma w/ Tsurube tonearm -- counterrotating twin platter is a terrific idea and the belt drive system is taut, dynamic.
Acoustic Solid Wood Reference -- massive platter riding on plastic-lined bearing for intimate fitting, in a thick multi-plex wood plinth and driven by a precision outboard motor via monofilament.
VPI Classic 3, for reasons mentioned previously, though it loses points for forcing its unipivot tonearm upon the buyer.
EAR -- the magnetic drive is intriguing, and Tim DiParavicini has yet to design anything inferior.
Then you have to solve the problem of what to place your turntable on. I could add others, like the Opera Droplet LP5.0, Tritium, vintage Micro-Seiki, on and on. But these that I've listed are investments of reasonable proportion (in the realm of high end audio) that won't disappoint. You'll just have to listen to some representative contenders from each drive technology and decide what's convincing to you in the differences of degree between them.
I'm not in favor of vacuum hold down. I was involved in the final development and productization of the Souther Linear Arm 30 years ago so I have a special appreciation for linear tracking tonearms, but I don't prefer the relatively massive current implementations nor their complexity. And anyway when you can get something as pure, simple and well-made as the Schick 12" tonearm today, a Tri-Planar, a Graham, or Brinkmann's 10.5" or even a Rega RB1000, know when to quit.
So, no -- DD won't always trump belt drive. Idler can be beautifully implemented but it won't always prevail either. There are excellent examples of all the primary drive systems -- even magnetic. But unless you're willing to buy blind, knowing any of these are going to sound good, you'll just have to listen and find out what characteristics are most convincing to you. Nothing, at any price, is going to be perfect.
Phil
