Reason for buying old/classic turntables

Chris, there is some serious "audiojewellery" out there - that Thorens would look quite nice in my rig and I bet it doesn't sound too shabby either! Great audio pieces are like great time pieces for me - aesthetics, performance, engineering and functionality all count. Of course it is always a matter of personal taste. One of the reasons that tipped my decision to unload my ARC Ref 3 was performance ..... good (but not the best), looks ...... ugly. Now beauty is in the eye of the beholder but I might have kept that piece if it looked gorgeous and I don't apologize for that because at the end of the day not only do I listen to my music, but I do have to look at the stuff as well - which could lead us into a different discussion altogether about whether we listen with our eyes when we make purchasing decisions on the big gear!

Steve

The classic car/classic turntable comparison doesn't really work. Statement products and R&D breakthroughs are always subsidized by the sales of mass market product or government funding. Automobiles have continued, until very recently, to benefit from high volume sales of mass market product. Turntables haven't enjoyed that, or any, subsidy since early in the 1980s.

Automobile manufacturers are multi-billion dollar businesses, while a company like Teres is almost hobby in nature. Chris has a full time job and remarkably has brought Teres into existence in his spare time. Look at the comparison of resources demonstrated by this example and then bring in an industry giant like VPI. Both companies have accomplished a great deal in the way of innovation but neither one brings in enough money per annum to pay the utility bill for one month at any Ford plant.

There just isn't any comparison at all. If the turntable biz was as well funded as the auto biz, I'm sure the turntables of today would completely eclipse the vintage products we all love but the resources and incentives have not been sufficient to stimulate that kind of progress. For that reason, the oldies still hold their own nicely despite comments to the contrary by those who benefit from trafficking in new product and reviewing it.

Don't forget the Luxmans.

The PD 121, PD-444, PD-441 are excellent DD tables. They offer up the pace and rythmn of the DD Goldmunds and Rockports. But, you must be careful to properly platform them. I've found that a maple butcher block sitting on sorbothane helps with floating the image. The PD-555 is in a class of its own. It's a belt drive with a vacuum platter.

A properly set up PD-121 can run circles around many modern belt drives. Plus the fit and finish is Lexus like.

Peter

It's a great analogy i.e. old versus new.

You're overthinking, or at least trying to, a very simple concept.

Good effort though.

Macrojack, the car analogy to me was not that bad. Car companies have had plenty of cash to play with R&D (until recently), but due to the corporate climate that was the *last* thing they were going to do. The result is that there has been only incremental improvement over the years. The same is true of turntables.

If you take a good car or good turntable from the 1960s, and outfit it with newer tweaks (vibration damping for example), many of them will perform quite nicely against the current lineup. IMO in the case of cars it should not be that way, but it is because of poor management, else we'd all be driving electric cars with 4000 mile range on a single charge by now (BTW that is not pie in the sky either).

This is why the old Garrard 301, the Empire 208, the Lenco and the Technics SP-10 all have a following. You can tweak them, and they keep up with the state of the art, no worries.