Sota or Technics

brother in law has Ultradeck w Isolation platform and Ortofon Bronze - sounds lovely.

Glad this worked out well for the OP

Cutting Lathe is also a turntable, but I doubt anyone can say “this Neumann cutting lathe is warmer and more dynamic than Skully cutting lathe”. The function of a turntable drive is to rotate on constant speed, period. The warmth or brightness coming from device that read the groove (aka phono cartridge), we are well aware of different sounding cartridges (completely different). 

@lewm - I am just saying that the turntable is less important than the arm or the cartridge/phono stage. Of course the noise created by the turntable differentiates it from others - it’s not just about getting the correct speed. And, of course better specs don’t necessarily mean better sound. Not everything audible is measurable and not everything measurable is audible. It would be easier for audiophiles to make equipment decisions if these statements weren’t true, but it’s not that simple. You need to listen.

@chakster -please confirm your agreement that turntables matter, even if they rotate at the correct speed, they can add varying amounts of noise.

I swear I can’t hear any noise from my turntables, they are dead quite and in this discussion I don’t want to talk about bad turntables, I know they are exist somewhere, but not in my world (I don’t use them). And I agree that a good turntable can be a belt drive, direct or idler, for all those good examples a cartridge is responsible for sound (and everything else between the cart and speakers, and room acoustics too).

I think we normally swap cartridges (matched to specific tonearms), phono stages or suts, tube users have fun with tube rolling, some people are crazy about cables.

I think we rarely swap turntables or speakers just for fun. I mean we may have a few systems, but it’s not like 5 different pair of speakers (I have 3 pairs) or 5 different turntables (I have 6), but I use just 2 turntables and a pair of speakers most of the time. When I want different flavor I can choose one of 4 different tonearms with matched cartridges connected to different phono stages, sound signature is different, but turntable is the same (Luxman PD-444 is my reference DD in the Lab, dead quiet low torque DD in its heavymetal plinth).

sokogear, I'd like to make a slight correction to your statement. Everything that is measurable is not audible but everything that is audible is measurable. Sound quality is subjective to some degree and subjectivity is not measurable. 
As an example, I can set up a measurement microphone, play some music and display a sonic spectrum on the computer. I can change the frequency response an see the change occurring on the computer in real time. I can go the other way and play a slow sine sweep and look at the frequency response curve. If I see something I do not like I can make an adjustment and run another sweep to see if I fixed the problem. Since I can run individual sweeps for each channel I can adjust them independently until the two channels are within 1 dB of each other from 100 Hz to 10 kHz.