Suspended vs. nonsuspended TT?

Cost of suspension :
1 concrete slab (or marble cutting block for higher WAF)
1 wad of soft foam (or bicycle inner tube, or sorbothane)
Can't cost more than $50 ... even to make it pretty.

Personally I have never found that the lack of suspension on my Rega Planar 3 to be a problem. I have used concrete and soft foam and marble block with soft foam and both worked perfectly fine. I was in the same situation ... spiked speakers (big floorstanders), turntable on a rack, all on a suspended wooden floor. I have no experience with suspension tables (I've only used Rega) so I can't say if they'd be better. But I cannot see that they would isolate better than a bloody great big slab of concrete sat on top of foam.

So in conclusion I'd get whichever TT sounds best in the audition and worry about building an isolation platform if you pick the non-suspended one.

Sean, how would one go about leveling something like that ? Some tables have both great mass and weight that is not equally divided amongst the footers. I can see the potential for GREAT problems using that method due to all of the variables involved. Sean
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Well, I have a Michell gyrodec and I love the sound of it, but I was ready to sell last week as it needed adjustment. Damn those spring suspension systems. A lot of it probably depends on the design itself but adjusting a spring suspension system is a major pain in the butt. I am thinking about switching to an Aries and or Nottngham for that reason alone. My listening room is in the basement on a concrete floor so I don't have to worry about vibration much but I know a guy that has a spring suspended table and it's on hard wood floors that are so sensitive he has to tip toe and at times crawl on the floor to get to his table without it freaking out from the vibration. If I were buying today, I'd get the best sounding least tweaky table their is. But also think about the kind of arms that fit with it and try to get some experience with some of the tone arms you might actually use. Some of them can be quite tweaky as well.

Thanks, all! I'll let you know how I proceed.

Matt

I have a Rega Planar 25 on a Bright Star Airmass/Bigrock combo on top of a spiked rack and you can hop around without skipping a beat. You level the table simply by shifting the Bigrock and or turntable around on the Airmass. The only potential problem with a do-it-yourself suspension is that you may have to experiment to get the optimal spring/mass ratio. A suspended turntable presumably also has damping. Maybe the soft foam idea from above can give you damping that an inner tube can't.