Reason for buying old/classic turntables

I can remember when DD was the main player, that Thorens prided itself on staying with belts, claiming that they could improve any direct-drive unit by adding a belt.

There is a quality to some of the older models, like a Thorens TD 124, a Garrard 301, a Dual 1229, a Rek O Kut 11, that just seems right. Properly set up, the deliverly of those older, idler wheel turntables is amazing, especially on solo piano. I abandoned my Linn LP12 with nearly 8k invested in mods, motors, arm etc, in favor of a Dual 1229 which I installed a Grace 747 arm on. My second choice would be to find a good Thorens TD-124. Belt drive, direct drive can both deliver good results, but their is just something about the pace, pitch and power of an idler driven table. Also, the build quality, and engineering is first rate. By far, the best listening experience I have ever had.

I replaced my Well-Tempered Reference Table with a Technics SP-10 MK II because the Technics is better. I wasn't being fashionable, cute or nostalgic.

As Mike suggested above, the Japanese DD tables of the late seventies and early eighties were statement products whose R&D was subsidized by the sale of millions of mass market tables. There is no such subsidy today and no investor could hope for a return on investment in sales of comparable products today.
The EPA 100 tonearm on that SL-1000 MK II table in the ad you guys are talking about, was Harry Pearson's reference arm for years and still competes favorably with much of what is for sale today. It is probably worth $1000 all by itself. It has 20 highly polished rubies in use as ball bearings and utilizes a very clever dynamic balance adjustment so that it can be used with any cartridge regardless of compliance.

The engineers who designed and built this stuff were every bit as capable as today's garage tinkerer's. They don't receive the same publicity, of course, because they are not being advertised in the review magazines and they cannot be stocked by high volume dealers.

The implicit superiority of modern product is mythology at its best.

Agree that $3000 for a Technics is just crazy, when you can get a good Thorens or Garrard for that. The build quality and sound of those tables is fantastic, better than anything I have heard so far being built nowadays.

FWIW, I find that the flagship direct-drive TTs of Japan in the late 1970s and early 1980s are really quite good. I have one which I enjoy quite a bit. However, they are from being the same. Some of them were relatively light, with very high-torque motors - like the Technics SP-10 Mk2 (and in particular, one other which I will not yet name because I am trying to find one!). Others were lower torque but higher inertia-moment players like the Yamaha PX-1, the Onkyo PX-100M, and a few others (note that when I call these low-torque players, they were not slouches - they all had torque 30-100% higher than the Technics SL-1200 series - but they had half the torque of the Technics SP-10Mk2). Having heard the SP-10Mk2 in the at-the-time very expensive original plinth vs some of the others, I prefer some of the others in stock form. That said, every table in a super-heavy plinth that I have ever heard outdid the same table in the cheaper plinth which came with it.