@sbank , another happy Sound Labs/ Sota guy! Great minds hear alike:-).
meldiscman, I owned an Oracle for a year or so. It is a pretty turntable but like the Linn LP12 it has a stability problem and it is not nearly as nice to use as a Sota. They recently added damping wells to the design and this may have improved things a bit. For a similar price you can get a Sota with vacuum clamping which takes everything to the next level. It will not flatten severe warps but most records do not have severe warps. Do this experiment. Put a test record on and place a dime under the edge of the record. Play a 1000 Hz test tone. You will easily hear the tone warble especially if your vertical bearing is above record surface level. It does not take much warping to cause very audible effects. Vacuum clamping pulls the record down onto the flat surface of the platter with rather obvious results. Perhaps sbanks will comment on this as his Nova is a vacuum version.
meldiscman, I owned an Oracle for a year or so. It is a pretty turntable but like the Linn LP12 it has a stability problem and it is not nearly as nice to use as a Sota. They recently added damping wells to the design and this may have improved things a bit. For a similar price you can get a Sota with vacuum clamping which takes everything to the next level. It will not flatten severe warps but most records do not have severe warps. Do this experiment. Put a test record on and place a dime under the edge of the record. Play a 1000 Hz test tone. You will easily hear the tone warble especially if your vertical bearing is above record surface level. It does not take much warping to cause very audible effects. Vacuum clamping pulls the record down onto the flat surface of the platter with rather obvious results. Perhaps sbanks will comment on this as his Nova is a vacuum version.