Ralph, That's a pretty dogmatic approach, but thanks for your post. The Herbie's is "rubber", or something that looks and feels like rubber. The BA Mat 1 is graphite, which would seem on principle to be a good idea. Both have their admirers. Lenco Lovers say good things about the stock Lenco mat, which is a ribbed rubber design. If you read the owner's manual for my Denon DP80, they go to great lengths to say how the mat was specially designed and formulated to work well with the table and they advise against using any other mat. It's a heavy rubbery material with varying density from outer to inner. I'm just wondering what folks are using with vintage tts. Do you use the stock Empire mat with your Empire? Mats are certainly a black art. By the way, what mat is going to be so soft and spongy as to depress under the <2gm weight of the stylus, which force is distributed across the surface of a rigid vinyl LP?
Record mats for vintage tts
What record mats have been found to work best with vintage tts, like Garrard 301/401, Lenco L75, Technics SP10, Denon, Sony, etc? Those tts almost all sported rubber mats that were said to have been specifically designed for the respective platters. I wonder if indeed that holds up in the modern era, where we have such a wide choice of after-market mats. I've been going back and forth between a Herbie's and a Boston Audio Mat 1 on my Lenco and can't quite decide which is best in my system. The stock Lenco mat is very decent sounding, too.