Turntables currently considered top of the range. Do you know what they are ?

Ralph, of course, master tapes. The flow and drive of the tape..

Recently saw some vintage tube Studer on ebay for, I think, $35k or so. Now that was a thing of beauty.

Any thoughts on the Holbo deck from Slovenia? It combines an air bearing turntable with a linear tracking tonearm, which also runs on air.  Driven by rubber bands, though!

Got an excellent review: Holbo Mk II Airbearing Turntable Review | StereoNET International

This is just about $50K. I put this here, because I have this, except mine is the regular Innovation turntable and I have the Statement record weight, at $30K for everything, but I am thinking about adding the field upgrade kit to the Master Innovation for another ~$20K

Yeah the field-upgrade was a selling point when I bought a brand new Innovation Wood, exactly 12 years ago. In the end, I "upgraded" by buying a minty used Master Innovation (dealer floor model) for less than the upgrade price alone, and then sold my Innovation Wood on top of that.

One thing I’ve noticed, that’s seemingly not published nor explained by Clearaudio - my Master is a VERY early unit circa 2013, in fact its serial # is either # 2 or 3 (I forget which). More recent Master Innovations show a very beefed-up center column (holding the long bearing shaft), which should increase the table’s mass and rigidity. How is that reconciled with the field upgrade - or do all field upgrades assume the smaller-sized center column, since that’s what (I think) all Innovation Woods have?

In general - upgrade paths from high-end turntables companies - oof, very expensive.

@mulveling For the Master Innovation field upgrade the whole bearing assembly for the Innovation part is removed and replaced with a new beefed-up one included in the upgrade kit. The result is the same as the current retail unit. My Innovation Wood was purchased August 2023 so it’s a relatively newer one.

If you go to the Clearaudio website the Master Innovation product page has the manual for the field upgrade. You can see exactly how that upgrade all works.

What did you think of the difference between the Wood and the Master?