$800 Cartridge Shootout and Upgrade Path

Jim - I saw some days back a review of the Ginko stands. Those are new items AFAIK and not heard them personnaly, but looks like a promising design and sensible priced.

Fernando

Chris, I think that you'll like the GPA rack. It is a very good one. There are really only 2 racks in that upper level category, and those are GPA and Sistrum. Our approach is totally different to the solution of the vibration issue. GPA tries to stop the vibrations from going up from the floor, and Sistrum tries to provide an exit path for the vibrations to transfer to ground. Of course, we feel that our solution is the better one. In either case, you'll have a very good performing rack. It's sort of like deciding between a Walker and a Rockport. You're not going to have anything bad, whichever one you decide upon. Your particular application will determine the outcome.

Fernando- Thanks, but my question is about the apparent paradox of the WT table having soft rubber feet when the conventional wisdom is to have unsuspended tables sitting on a hard surface. Other unsuspended tables typically have hard or even spiked feet.

Regards
Jim

Jim, I haven't owned a WT turntable myself, but typically a manufacturer puts feet on the TT that are "the best that they found under the $2 price point that they are willing to spend on feet". These "footie" feet may very well have been the best sounding ones that WT tried for under a couple of dollars. But, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will outperform all other feet on that table. It only means that they will outperform all other very low cost feet, in the opinion of the manufacturer. It is quite possible, and even probable, that a high quality and probably much more expensive set of properly designed "feet" would significantly kick the butt of those stock feet on the WT. It happens on nearly every other TT made, so I expect it would be the same in your case.

When manufacturers are designing to a price-point, things like feet really take a back seat,and get the lowest amount of consideration and budget.

Well, this thread has been a little dead but since we left off with the rack scenario I figured that I would report my findings. I have been living with the Grand Prix Audio Monaco stand for 6 days now and couldn't be happier. I would say that the general statements made about squishy bits and turntables should, like most general statements, be qualified specificly. Perhaps some have had negative experiences in these areas but I think it's different as applied to the Grand Prix rack.

I've had a rigid Michael Green rack for a long time. In ordre to isolate my Oracle turntable(sitting on a Bright Star Big Rock) from floor vibrations that made it skip with footfalls, I built a wood platform for the rack where the 20 inches underneath the rack was suspended. This was the only way to get back to playing vinyl. It worked but was a less than elegant solution to the creaky floorboard problem.

Enter the Grand Prix Audio rack. With the rack set up on Apex footers, I have no skipping problems. This is with the Oracle set directly on the top shelf of the stand. When I put the table on the Bright Star Big Rock, it was isolated even further. Music has never sounded so good. The backgrounds are jet black, music has far more 3 dimensional depth and music rocks when it rocks, and swings when it swings. I have played The Stooges Funhouse to make sure that the blistering roar of guitar on "TV Eye" is everything that it should be, I have played Bach's Cello Suites by Starker, to make sure that the impressive nature of that intimate sound is preserved. The entire system is sounding natural and at ease. The Miles Davis Quintet box set has been been playing quite a bit because of the impressive nature of the sound I am getting. Yo La Tengo, Butthole Surfers, The Cows, John Zorn, Budapest and Emerson String Quartets playing Beethoven, Fritz Wunderlich singing, John Fahey strumming guitar, it's all been marvelous.

With my other rack I had Black Diamond Cones and Pucks and Townsend Seismic Sinks and Bright Star Little Rocks and brass cones etc etc and all I had done was tweak so hard for detail (with my all tube system)that when I got a new SS preamp(Pass X1), it sounded brittle and hard. Put the equipment on the GPA stand and the Pass sounds detailed and full. I was over tweaking to make up for the lack of transparency in other components. Now all those components sound better than they ever have. Has it fixed them? No, my CD player is long in the tooth and definitely due for an upgrade. I'm planning on getting a new turntable. The real deal here is that I feel for the first time I am hearing what my components sound like, and more, what they are capable of. And I have done it without a bajillion $$$ in tweaks.

This has changed my views on upgrades. I figured I'd get around to getting a new rack when I had my system "done". Now I'm realizing that I need to be able to hear what my system sounds like so I can contemplate what the next steps would be.

Now, about those squishy bits, they're rated for the weight each shelf is going to be holding and this puts them at a certain compression. This means that I'm not going to be overdamping, I'm gonna be damping, to quote Goldilocks again, "Just right." Read the GPA web site, it will explain the technical nature of the multiple ways that these stands deal with airborne AND floorborne vibrations better than I. As for high-mass tables. Well, I sent an email to GPA and was pleasantly surprised to get a phone call from Alvin Lloyd. We discussed how his stands worked and what my concerns are. He has many customers that use these stands with non-suspended tables and I felt confident at the end of our talk that he had addressed my concerns. Alvin told me to try my table without the Bright Star and then try it with, he never seemed dogmatic about how I should try to use the stand and never told me to throw away my tweaks but invited me to try them out to find what sounds best to me. I appreciated this because, as we've discussed above, the only person who can truly know what sounds best is ourselves.

Having this here has opened up the entire room. I live in a tiny studio so this is nice. But now the platform is gone and I can get to the windows to open them up. This stand just looks beautiful.

The end result being that I'm more than a GPA demo'er, I am now a proud owner. Sorry Twl, I know that the Sistrum Stands are great but my equipment sounded so good on this that there was no way I was letting it go.

I want to thank Tim at Experience Audio for coming over on his day off to bring and set-up the rack because that was when it was convenient for me. He never pushed the rack on me, I came to GPA on my own and after being blown away by the amp stand, was hungry for more.

To get back to analog, I have contacted both Thom Mackris and Chris Brady in Colorado and confirmed availability for the next couple of months. I am going to buy tickets this weekend and will be flying out sometime (except during CES) to see my pal in Colorado and to check out some awesome turntables.

As for the $800 Cartridge? Well, Experience Audio is also a Shelter dealer so I'll neatly end where we began, with the Shelter 501 on the table or more precisely, on the arm.

Thanks to Twl, Artar1, DougDeacon and the rest who have made this thread a real journey for me. Soon to end up in Audio Nirvana.......

Chris