The urge to tinker is awash. What TT might better mine and why?

Well after some tweaking of arm and cart setup on the Denon I can see why the dl103d is so popular.

It has bloomed nicely from the tweaking, bass has more depth, more air and separation. Overall a pretty good budget cart that came with tt so hard to complain.
And after looking at specs on VinylEngine it is really not a bad match for the arm.

However I will be trying out some vintage mm carts on this table along the lines of Pickering, Shure, ADC etc.
Its fun to have new toys and at the price point of vintage mm carts not the end of the world.

@markmendenhall personally i love the Nott sound and didn’t want to get away from it, so I just got ‘more of it’

Yep. And air bearings are yet more of the same. I much prefer the ’sound’ of really good bearings to anything else, regardless of the touted advantages of this technology or that.

T9

I’m by no means a techie, not even close, but the absolute minimalist design of the Nott makes me think (right or wrong) that it’s gonna play what’s on the record: no more, no less. Having owned two Notts going back 15 years, the reading I’ve done on materials and implementation tends to focus on bearing design, which is line with your thinking.  I look at all the mechanical and electrical parts inherent in rim drive and direct drive tables and intuitively I think simpler has to be better.  Of course that’s too easy to definitely conclude and proper implementation of most designs can yield spectacular results, we all know that from experience.  All my components stress ‘low noise floor’, including the Nott.  Music just creeps, erupts, eases, or bursts from a dead silent, inky black background and fills the stage with a wide and deep sonic panorama, particularly with well preserved and recorded vinyl.  

@markmendenhall 

Agree 100%.