Spindle oil

Teres: If your stylus is centered in the groove, there's minimal drag. The only "friction" that the stylus should encounter would be converted as motion in the cantilever, which energizes the cartridge and is converted to electrical impulses known as music. If the stylus is exerting massive amounts of drag i.e. enough to cause the platter to destabilize rotational speed and effect the stability of the motor / speed regulation system, you're vinyl system is in really bad shape.

Then again, i keep forgetting some very important facts here. Most of you folks are using pivoted arms that are only in the center of the groove at two points per record side. I guess that if i were dragging my stylus sideways through all of grooves except for a very few, i'd be more concerned about this. Then again, one would think that they would be more concerned with the damage being done to their irreplaceable vinly recordings than to how much speed variation such an arrangement was causing.

Outside of all of this, i guess that one should contact the manufacturer of their table. They should know how well their products are designed and whether or not they need some type of "band aid" to work properly. Sean
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Sean, I'm suprised to see this side of you. Now that you have been proven wrong, you've decided to go on the attack labeling designs that deviate from what you consider to be proper as "piss-poor?"

If the platter rotates at a constant speed and continues to do so for a long period of time then it is a good design, case closed. It doesn't make one bit of difference how the final result is achieved.

So I'll go back to the original question and try to make my point once again. The folks at VPI, Teres, Linn, Basis, etc. have dedicated countless hours to optimize every aspect of the performance of their tables. I believe it to be highly unlikely that you can improve that performance by using a lubricant other than the one they recommend.

Herman: If a diamond can cut through hardened glass, what kind of "drag" could there be slicing through pre-cut grooves of soft vinyl? If there's enough "drag" there to cause speed irregularities, there's something wrong with the design of playback device.

Not only should there be enough inertia built up in the platter to more than compensate for any type of variance in drag caused by the stylus, the motor and speed regulation system should detect these variances as fast as they occur. The only reason that the motor / speed regulation circuitry couldn't correct quick enough is if it was of a poorer design with slow circuitry and / or there was too much drag on the bearing from using a heavy, motionally stable platter and too weak of a motor. As such, reducing the drag on the bearing would be beneficial in terms of both bearing and motor life and should contribute to faster response times from the speed correction circuitry as ANY drag would be noticed faster.

Like i've said before, what passes for "high end" typically only means "high price". You can throw money at a product but that doesn't make it well designed. Friction is the enemy of any well designed product that requires motion. After all, friction generates more heat, causes more wear, requires more force and is nothing more than lost energy. Sean
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Sean, while I respect your opinion on most matters, after looking into this a little more deeply, just about everything you said turns out to be wrong.

Your diamond cutting glass analogy makes no sense. The stylus isn't "slicing" through the vinyl, it rides along the surface following the modulations already cut into it, and just because the stylus is harder than the vinyl doesn't mean there isn't any friction. It is well documented that the stylus temperature can easily reach in excess of 100 degrees celsius. Where do you think that heat comes from? I'm guessing friction, and the drag caused by that friction must be dealt with.

You are also confused about the differences in viscous damping and friction. "Friction is the enemy of any well designed product that requires motion. After all, friction generates more heat, causes more wear, requires more force and is nothing more than lost energy." Viscous damping is not causing the bearing to wear away.

Your idea about instantaneous speed correction is completely incorrect. The motor doesn't and can't correct for every tiny variation in speed that would be caused by the stylus and there isn't a turntable in the world that uses the motor controller to do this.

It won't work for the same reason that motor driven, servo controlled linear tracking tonearms won't work. With the tonearm you are constantly trying to correct for something that has already happened so the arm is always out of postion. Same thing with the system you advocate. Even if you could build a controller fast enough to keep up, in order for it to compensate for the variations in stylus drag it would have to be able to predict when they will occur, and that's not going to happen.

So how can you overcome these variations in drag caused by the stylus when you can't predict when they will occur? One way is to introduce another source of drag into the system (such as viscous damping) that is far greater than the stylus drag, and while the motor is working to overcome this induced steady state drag it will in effect ignore the tiny variations caused by the stylus. To use an electronic term you may be familiar with, they are swamped out.

This is not poor engineering. It is a brilliant, simple, elegant solution to the problem.