SOTA vacuum or no?

I have a Superscoutmaster and even aside from the sound improvement, I think that flattening a record is extremely worthwhile. A flat record permits the arm to travel across the record effortlessly. The quieter the arm movement, the less the cartridge has to deal with riding out those warps. I certainly would always go for a clamping system.

The vacuum option is available on both the Sapphire and the Nova. The Nova has a different bearing material IIRC and some other changes in the substructure. The clamping makes a difference. There is an increase in low level resolution that is hard to give up once you recognize the difference. There was a review in Audio a few years ago that measured the differences between the vacuum on and off. The graphs showed a dramatic reduction in the amount of spurious resonances in the vinyl once the vacuum was turned on.
You may NOT like the result of this reduction but that's another story.

Dear Rockinrobin: My advise is that you try to find the AT 666 vacuum mat from Audio Technica ( second hand for around 300.00 ) and improve your VPI to Superscoutmaster.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.

I like the SOTA over my dads VPI for not just the Vac but also the suspension.....cheers

I have used all sorts of clamps including SOTA's own excellent mechanical clamp, but after getting my SOTA Star vacuum some years ago, I have retired all the mechanical clamps in favor of the vacuum system. Just today I played a set of records which were "dished" . The vacuum was able to flatten them, whereas a clamp would be useless unless it used a rim ring.