Why will no other turntable beat the EMT 927?

Dear Lewm,
the Boulder 2008 phonostage comes with personality cards for the cartridge set up. The cards serve two functions - switches to set the electronics for the type of cartridge used at the input, and places to solder the custom load termination resistor and capacitor. The cards provide also a Demag function.

I am using Vishay resistors. The perfect and ideal matching cartridge loading - as I have found out - is quite a busy job. I am pretty sure that most users only go for the shipped cards. This is what I also learned from the reviews :-)
I also pretty much enjoy having installed two additional equalization cards carrying two more equalization curves, so now providing RIAA, EMI and Columbia.
btw Mike Fremer was right with his assessment on this unit despite some users prefer tubed phono stages.

Thanks Dkarmeli! Maybe one day I will write a bit more about the Vox and its development.

Dkarmeli,
just an excursion, when you read the article about the Atomic clock you may get an insight when digital really does sound great, the Dac in master mode and the word clockings steered by the Rubidium clock. What a difference! but these are details of a different world which is also very fascinating.
I understand why most analogue friends don't believe in the quality of digital reproduction. Nevertheless if you ever get deep into it the dCS stack it is an overwhelming alternative, or not?

Thuchan,

Not so humble! Bavarian Voice? They have an uncanny resemblance to Kevin Scott's Vox Olympians. The back story should be as interesting as the speakers themselves.

Good for you for designing your room. In my experience the listening space is a key component of the chain. A bad room will kill any sound system and a good one will elevate even a mediocre system to new heights. Here in the US, most people's listening rooms I visit are average at best and I have say lucky if they don't totally suck. Over the years I designed and built a number of different rooms for clients as well as a couple for myself. Of course starting from scratch with money no object budget creating a great listening space is relatively straight forward if you know what you're doing but setting up a decent listening space in an existing multifunction space within a budget is a very different challenge. I gained a lot of experience from my projects in manhattan, I totally understand your 2 year journey to build the room. I hope that you got most of it right by now.

The Toho arms look magnificent, a rare gem!

Glass or felt platter, like many of the choices we make has also to do with the rest of the chain and what direction we take tweaking that system. I can't judge your over all system sound from looking at the blog pictures but its enough for me to answer you differently now that I can see your MS setup. Initially I thought that you had the SX-8000 mk2 which was sonically more advanced than the original SX-8000. In this case I will say that you'll hear significant improvements with the AirForce One. You also introduced another variable going from inertia driven thread drive to motor driven platter, my guess is that you went this way to compensate for the FR-66. You gain some body and midrange energy at the expense of airiness and lower bass extension/definition. You might rethink the vpi setup if you replaced the FR with a 3012. Your blog is very informative to understand what you're comparing the R80 to. I thought that we're discussing subtleties and nuances here while in your system with those gorgeous speakers the R80 must be kicking Continuum and the FR-66'd MS butt big time!

Dear Thuchan. Regarding the loading of the personality cards on your Boulder 2008, did you literally solder in each set of resistors, break them in, and repeat that process until you found the correct loading? I tried installing "clip in" connectors, so that I could quickly change resistors. Unfortunately, those connectors degraded the sound so severely that I gave up on that idea. Anyway, my question is this: did you discover any easy way to try out different resistor values? Thanks.