Jeff can buy from them with confidence and expect any problem to be correctly, promptly and professionally handled.
Thanks Mark, I wish they had a store front in the Pittsburgh area, since they are a B&M I won't hesitate to buy from them.
Mark, do you have any thoughts on the acrylic platter, is there any advantage besides a heavier platter and no need for a mat. I'm making my own record clamp out of a rubber laboratory stopper that is 2" diameter and tapers down. I also still have my Cecil Watts Dust Bug that you reco'd to me so many years ago, I won't spin a record without it.
Jeff
Again Jeff, there is a lot of hype and nonsense with modern turntables.
The bogus theory about acrylics is that resonances produced by the needle in the groove (bogus right there), will be damped because acrylic is like the material the LP is made from, which is vinyl and not acrylic, and that will damp this non existent resonance. All BOGUS, BOGUS and BOGUS.
The same goes for record clamps.
I think you will actually be better off with the stock turntable. Record clamps are more nonsense.
I personally am of the opinion that good vintage turntables rule.
A turntable needs to operate with wow and flutter below the detectable threshold.
A pickup arm needs to be adjustable in all important parameters. It need low friction laterally and vertically. The arm should be as non resonant as possible and rigid.
The difficult area is the resonant product, of arm weight and inertia, cartridge weight and compliance. This is where things get tricky. The compliance of the cartridge its weight and arm inertia, is a classic sprung to unsprung weight problem, just like a car suspension. It really is important to get this right as no record is perfectly flat. In addition getting the sprung to unsprung weight design correct so this resonance falls in the right place. In addition this resonance needs to be damped. In other words a shock absorber is required, just like a car. Practically no arms are damped. The original Decca arms were and the the SME arms can and should be damped. Only Shure put dampers on their top end cartridges.
Stan Kelly back at the dawn of stereo when he designed the Decca ffss maintained that the arm and cartridge should be designed as a unit. He is correct. However this did not happen. Eventually Decca was force to go from this to this.
To this for reason of market forces.
What this boils down to, is that low mass high compliance cartridges require low mass low inertia arms and heavier, lower compliance cartridges require more massive arms.
In their hey day the Shure V15 series were very popular. The SME series three arms were optimized for these cartridges. The damper was synergistic with the damper on the cartridge.
I will post the SME series III picture again, so you can see the damper.
The curved bath is filled with silicone fluid, and there is a paddle at the back of the tone arm that goes into the fluid bath. There are paddles of various widths that can be changed for cartridges of different weights and above all compliance.
The brush on the front of this Shure V 15 xmr is actually a shock absorber called a damper and is synergistic with the silicone bath damper.
It is proven sound engineering solutions like this that create excellence in LP reproduction and not the BS of Audiophools.
A Shure V15 xmr on an SME series III arm with damper installed mounted on a good turntable provides unsurpassed LP reproduction on all discs. If the disc has significant warpage, then this combination leaves all other systems way in the dust.
It is no wonder that when a decent turntable, with an SME series III arm and Shure V15 xmr fetches an out of sight price when they rarely come up. Pretty much no one with this combination is going to part with it, except under severe duress.
I have listened to turntables costing as much as a luxury car, but they perform worse than the system I outlined, which addresses the real problems and issues of LP reproduction and not imaginary ones.
