A Copernican View of the Turntable System

Dear Ct0157,
Maybe some day I will find time to test the Denon without its plinth. Right now there are at least 3 major home audio projects that come first. I am a DIYer, and I have been extensively revising the circuits in my huge Atma-sphere monoblocks. This has already taken months, since I am very anal about making the necessary decisions. It will take at least 2 months more. Then I intend to install a new attenuator in my MP1 preamp. Then I may build an LCR phono stage dedicated to MM cartridges that we have been discussing. In the spaces of time between these projects, I have all those MM and MI cartridges to evaluate in all those tonearms I now own. Once I have a handle on that, THEN I might even think about trying the no-plinth idea, but I have no clue how I would mount the Denon in space, and to make an arm pod....sheesh! I am just as smug as you no-plinthers; I like what I have, and while I enjoy this discussion, I really don't buy any of the arguments thus far put forward in favor of no plinth and especially in favor of independently mounted outboard arm pods. (And as either Syntax or DT wrote, no one is really talking about no plinth, because absence of a surround still leaves you with a casing or something around the motor and drive assembly.) The only thing I WILL say, and I am rather tired of repeating it, is that obviously there are such things as "bad" plinths. I have heard two such. I can readily believe that no plinth may sound better than a bad plinth. But I think possibly the attraction of no plinth is primarily that it may introduce euphonic colorations that are ablated with a really good plinth that can render the turntable "neutral". (Of course, one man's neutral is another man's "lifeless".) And the beat goes on.

By the way, I certainly don't think I have "vast experience". Thanks for the compliment (assuming it was not facetious), but for most of my 35-year audiophile career, I owned only one tt, one tonearm, one cartridge at any one time. I am into this multi-everything craziness for only 2-3 years. Audiogon has been my undoing.

Dear Lew,
If you'd get off these damn audio sites you might get something finished?
:-)

But I think possibly the attraction of no plinth is primarily that it may introduce euphonic colorations that are ablated with a really good plinth that can render the turntable "neutral".

Hard to follow the logic here?

Dear Halcro, I don't want to spoil the picture of the "magnetically elevated above a shelf DD tt" with the "rigidly held, isolated armpod fixed to the shelf, so that the geometrical relationships with the elevated turntable/platter remain correct and immovable." - so let's give that model a short thought.
A few points, a) energy of the tracking process will still find its way through the magnetic field. b) due to the omnipresent curse of building resonance alone, there will a relative movement of the fixed-to-shelf armpod in relation to the magnetic elevated DD (due to the kind of "spring"-effect of the magnetic field).

Honestly, - the fv-diagram was just a simple proposal to illustrate that the energy inside a working record playback system will travel and where and how it travels. That energy, its amplitude and reflections are responsible to a large extend for the turntable's share of what we call "sound".

It was just a proposal to illustrate the physic behind sonic discussion of a component (here a machine).
I certainly am perfectly fine, if the discussion returns to and concentrates on the ultimate audiophile fallback position: "I and a few others prefer that sound".
Cheers,
D.

Dear Ct0517, in my 30+ years of high-end audiomania, most of the real great "sonic improvements" came out of giving things a deep and throughout thought. Plain field experiment and try-and-error is anyway as good as my approach.
It is just that I want to know why a system or a component does what it does the way it does.
Cheers,
D.