Is Direct Drive Really Better?


I've been reading and hearing more and more about the superiority of direct drive because it drives the platter rather than dragging it along by belt. It actually makes some sense if you think about cars. Belt drives rely on momentum from a heavy platter to cruise through tight spots. Direct drive actually powers the platter. Opinions?
macrojack
Direct drivers - like Psychic animal - continue to declare DD the best, in the absence of having heard idler-wheel drives, though they feel free to make use of my findings and reasoning, to defend their own system, which they have invested in.

Johnmathias,

My first TT was an idler wheel drive.

So much for trying to be a *psychic*.

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Zaikesman,
I think I understand your point. Recreation of the original performance requires retracing the original steps at the original pace. Or in other words the duplicate must be exactly symmetrical to the original in order to precisely mimic it in reverse -- mistakes included.
The concept is simple enough but saying it so that others can understand my meaning isn't quite so simple.
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MJ and V: Obviously we can't achieve a correct 1:1 correspondence, or probably even seek one realistically speaking. (Although if that were the goal, then you could make the argument that going with a Technics SP which used the same motor/controller as a Matsushita disk-cutter would be a reasonable strategy. However, lacquers aren't the same as vinyl, cutter-heads aren't the same as cartridges, and of course inscribing a groove isn't the same as following one.) The real point may be that, even were we able to achieve "perfect" playback with zero speed distortion (which we can't), if the record weren't cut the same way, you'd still wind up with speed distortion. Boiled down: You'll always have speed distortion. But we already knew that.

As to Viridian's observation, if our theoretical turntable suffers less dynamic drag on transients than the cutting lathe (maybe not as unreasonable an assumption as it might seem, given the presumably much greater frictional resistance encountered by a cutting-head in inscribing the groove as opposed to a stylus merely reading it), then pitches will go slightly sharp on transients. If the turntable suffers more dynamic drag than the lathe on the other hand, then transient pitches will go slightly flat. All in all though, I don't think it's completely unreasonable to speculate that these speed distortions at the mastering and playback ends might indeed have some rough natural correspondence which tends to mitigate the problem more than exacerbate it.