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Do I buy an upscale TT?

I recently heard a $50K TT at a friend’s and was floored by the performance.


It was a sound from a system I have never heard.

I have a very nice Woodsong Garrard 301, Tri-Planar arm and Grado Epoch 3 cartridge. Going into an Atma-Sphere MP-1 pre wt phono.

Discovered an affordable TT based on the Legendary Commonwealth idler drive TT (said to be among the best). One is $8500 and the other more elaborate one is $15K.

And there is another highly modified brass Garrard 401 for $10K. (said to be as good as the Commonwealth)

The big question is whether or not I am going to be pleased with the improvement in sound? There will certainly be a lot of hassle to change TTs!

mglik
solypsa's avatar
solypsa
462 posts
 

@coltrane1 nice setup. As to smoking a 301/401 well probably not. I've hear both in a few setups but YMMV :)

Btw hello fellow Washingtonian...

coltrane1's avatar
coltrane1
683 posts
 

@solypsa, Greetings! I live in Lake Stevens, a quiet country community of about 15,000 people, 45 minutes north of Seattle. Life is very good! Retired and loving every day I wake up! :)

mjcmt's avatar
mjcmt
710 posts
 

Miglik, as mentioned before, but you owe it to yourself to hook your turntable up to your friend’s obvious audiophile system and compare the sound. You may be surprised how good your Garrard is.

This could make you rethink what may be a better upgrade.

bigkidz
3,324 posts
 

Do you have the same phono stage that your friend has?  If not, then start there.

 

Happy Listening.  

dctom
104 posts
 

I had a  Kuzma XL Dc, 2 arms, 4pt and ref 313 , various carts including an atlas. It was my ultimate TT , carefully isolated, it sounded great. Along the way I built a sophisticated streamer coupled with a lampizator dac and it sounded as good, sometimes better, on every thing except some very well recorded analogue jazz albums LPs. 

Moving  house necessitated  selling  the Kuzma system. I still have a couple of thousand LPs so now have a Technics SL 1200 G which produces a sound very close to the Kuzma with subtle improvements in tonality.

The mega TTs possibly produce amazing results but lower down it is possible to achieve excellent results more affordably. Form my experience of numerous TTs I have found the phono stage/MC step up imposes a massive influence on the quality of the sound achieved.

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