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want new plinth ideas for direct-drive turntables


By now, the idler-drive genre has enough ink on them without me adding anything new to the topic. What is little talked about is the "guts" of direct-drive tables. Many vintage DD units suffered from bad plinth design with inadequate solidity (often mounted to crappy plastic or flimsy particle-board) and inadequate isolation from resonance and interference of electronics.

I like the bare bone approach, that is, to take the motor out of the chassis/plinth/enclosure and mount it to a something solid, material of your own choice, and extend the cable by at least couple feet to the stock chassis or an enclosure that contains the electronics/motor-drive/control-console/power-supply. In fact, the Monaco Grand-Prix, Teres Certus, or early Micro-Seiki DDX/DQX-1000 takes the same approach.

Almost ALL DD tables can be improved this way. There are many other brands of superb DD tables with great potential out there can be had for very reasonable price and can be converted this way with good result. I no longer have any Technics tables on hand to experiment but I still got great results with some mid-priced JVC, Pioneer, Kenwood, Yamaha, etc... I haven't tried it on Sony and Denon tables yet because they require mounted a tapehead to check platter speed so the mounting is tricky. Modern belt-drive turntables have been doing similar things by separating the motor from the main plinth. Once again, Micro-Seiki was ahead of their time with their RX-1500 and beyond. It's only logical DD will go that direction. The days of having everything in a box for DD tables seems less attractive to me now.

If you have other ideas, feel free to talk about it here. And hopefully this will generate more new interest in the DD genre. Personally I am more interested in people's experience with brands other than Technics as they already got enough coverage in other forums and threads. Nothing against Technics, just want to direct attention to other sleepers out there. Anyway, still feel free to share ideas.

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hiho
mikelavigne
2,200 posts
 
Dertonarm, i'm not surprised with your experience with isolation such as the Vibraplane and Minus-K. i will be very interested in your audition of the Halcyonics. 4 years ago i had a Halcyonics in my room for an evening and it was very eye openning hearing the effect on my digital transport and preamp. i only had my 600 pound Rockport at the time so i did not have a chance to try it under a tt.

btw, you likey would enjoy this tutorial about SOTA active isolation from the Herzon site. read all 6 pages. it mentions and compares the best passive isolation such as the Minus-K and air suspension to the current active technology.
weisselk
48 posts
 
You might want to take a look at this-

http://www.oswaldsmillaudio.com/Products/turntables.html
hiho OP
451 posts
 

Very nice. It's about time someone take the motor out of the damn SP10 chassis! Why do you sink the platter so deep into the slate? Wouldn't the shortness of the platter limit the choice of tonearm? Isn't this much like Lenco stock top-plate that people have to cut out a hole and sink the arm mount area to allow more arm choices? When I used to have the SP10 I always wanted to lift the platter higher so I can use it to belt-drive another platter. Anyway, it's good to see such product exist. Thanks for sharing.

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hiho OP
451 posts
 

Now, that's the Kaneta spirit! That's exactly what I am talking about! Thanks again Weisselk for alerting me that. Almost all vintage DD tables can be improved this way. I have seen and owned so many DD tables whose performance suffers so much from bad plinth when their guts have so much potential. I don't care how fancy the plinth is if you don't take the motor out you are still using a flimsy chassis to house all the motor, electronics, and power supply rattling inside.

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weisselk
48 posts
 
Hello Hiho,

First, a disclaimer- Weisselk is me, Jonathan Weiss, and I own OMA. I'm pretty new here to Audiogon and I want to follow the rules.

Regarding the platter height, it is actually sunk in MORE on the original chassis than in this design. We can vary the height of the armpod to any specification.

I have a completely stock SP10 MK3 here, in the original Obsidian Technics plinth, mounted with an EPA 100 arm and EPC 305MK2 cartridge- the absolute top of the line stock system. I can assure you that the OMA slate SP10 system in comparison with the MK3 is so vastly superior that it takes only a few seconds to hear it. The plinth is everything with the SP10, and fortunately the conversion is not impossible to do, as it would be with many of the other top DD decks. I have turned down several EMT owners, for example, who wanted slate plinths for their decks.

Jonathan Weiss
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