VPI Classic vs. Well Tempered Amadeus

I have been anxiously awaiting Vortex's update after setting up the WTA. So glad to hear the results so far. It's not the drugs afterall. It's the fact that Firebaugh has looked hard at the system of LP playback and re-addressed it with innovative out of the box thinking and design. If it takes a golf ball to do this efficiently, then who are we to argue. Don't have an Amadeus (yet) but I immediately heard the results of his vision the first time I set up my aged Well Tempered "Super". Something squeeky clean and liquid about the sound generated by his zero play platter bearing and floating fluid coupled arm. One of the most important things we want in a turntable is to lose the sense that the music is coming from anything rotating around. You should look over at the table and feel dumbfounded that such a life like illusion can be eminating from it. The Well Tempered products have always had this quality in spades. I certainly understand all the skepticism- no other product I recall has received such unanimous accolades. Particularly, even listeners who have been around the Analog block a few times seem to go GaGa over this thing. Good for you guys. You didn't go the easy route. You didn't just buy another safe bet Corvette. You had the balls to search out a Lotus.

Believe it. This table is the real deal.

I'm sorry, I don't. I heard it and it did not impress me. Perhaps if I hear it again, I'll retract my opinion. I'd have no problem doing so.

Btw, lack of a lift mechanism alone would prevent me from buying this table. It is not so much lowering the stylus onto the record as it is lifting the stylus off the record that would give me a life-threatening anxiety. A small, uncoordinated move and you could send the the cartridge to its demise. No, thank you.

you can get a lift mechanism for it from WT as an option. for me it is much easier lifting off than putting on. the great thing is nobody is forcing you to like it! you can be the one person who's heard it and was not impressed. like someone else said, this is probably the piece of gear with the most universal praise that I have ever seen. there is a reason for that.

It's certainly a curious design. I have a few questions for those who own it or are knowledgeable regarding the table's and tonearm's technical specifications.

1) From reading the WTA's review in TAS, I understand the WTA's tonearm has no resonance. That means it is impossible to match the cartridge with the tonearm to attain the desirable range of resonant frequency between 8-12 Hz as there is nothing to match. Correct? That means that you can use any cartridge on the market, regardless of its compliance as long as it can be physically mounted in the headshell, right? As a corollary to the desired frequency statement above, if the optimal range is 8-12 Hz and WTA's tonearm has none, where does this leave us?

2) Is there a clamp or a ring that can be used with the table? How do WTA's owners deal with records that have bigger warps?

Correction to 1): the TAS review did not state that the tonearm had no resonance, but that "[s]ince the arm works entirely by damping, it naturally damps out the arm/cartridge resonance very well indeed. Running the Shure Era IV test record to find the arm/cartridge resonant frequency, one comes surprisingly close to finding no resonance at all." Nonetheless, my question still stands, i.e., how does this fit with the optimal cartridge/tonearm resonant frequency between 8-12 Hz?