SOTA NOVA, HR-X VPI, Technics 1200G recommendations?

Mk3 then Mk2 was not the best of the rest in my system to my ears.

In my opinion, people who always blabling something about “vibration” are living in the earthquake area, probably right on top of the vulcano or very close, ***becase I really don’t understand what they are talking about***!? Using over 6 turntables at home I never ever noticed any audible problem with vibration, I’m using custom made metal racks on parquet floor.

Vibration is a problem on the dancefloor packed with 500 jumping people near 10 000 watts sound system - this is where turntable definitely must be seriously isolated. But even there you will see Technics DD in use!

@chakster  (Emphasis added above) This is what they are talking about:


If you really want to hear what your recordings actually sound like, controlling vibration in the turntable is paramount to that goal. I'm not talking about people on a dance floor, I'm talking about vibration induced in the turntable by the loudspeakers. In a nutshell, if your system sounds harsher at higher volumes particularly when playing LPs, this is something to look at! The vibration need not be very much, in fact it might be microscopic. But so is the groove of the LP.


To this end, if the platter is able to vibrate in a different way from the base of the tonearm, this will enable to the pickup to see that vibration and it will induce a coloration. To prevent this, the platter surface and base of the tonearm must be coupled in a very rigid and acoustically dead manner. In this way the platter and base of the arm will vibrate in the same plane if it vibrate, this preventing the vibration from being picked up by the cartridge.

Well, maybe because I never used a shitty turntables in my system, also made custom racks exclusively for them. And with a good metal mats on my direct drives everything was good. 

@chakster,  Michael Fremer liked some carbon fiber mat on Technics 1200G. Do you think CU-180 is better? How do you handle warped records? Periphery ring?

Thank you Ralph. In addition the cartridge is on a pivoted tonearm with it's own suspension and vibration characteristics. Noise in the room will affect the tonearm differently than it will the chassis creating a differential the cartridge could certainly pick up. With vibration passed through the bass such as foot fall the base is actually doing the moving and the chassis sits still in the same position in space. 
@chakster, if you have 100 people dancing on a bad floor the Technics will fail badly. DJs use them because they are cheap and they have a lot of torque. Not to mention that they put an oscillating magnetic device right under a very sensitive magnetic pick-up. No scientist in his right mind would ever do such a silly thing:-)