Reason for buying old/classic turntables

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.

I will frankly admit that I have become smitten with vintage tts only in the last year after acquiring a Lenco in a "giant direct-coupled" plinth. The Lenco was immediately perceived to sound better than my Notts Analog Hyperspace, so the Notts had to go. I then started to read the threads and the websites devoted to Garrard, Lenco, Technics, etc, with much more enthusiasm, thinking that if the Lenco is so excellent, what else am I missing? Vintage tts are a natural link to my lifelong hobby of collecting and restoring post WWII sports cars, mostly Porsches. Except in this case, I am wondering whether there is a real performance super bargain to be found out there. (An old Porsche will not ever be state of the art in perfomance per se.) Plus, the vintage tts are relatively cheap and are at the very least stable in value. So what do you have to lose? Now I've got a second Lenco, a Garrard 301, two Technics SP10s (a MkII and a IIA), and a Denon DP80. Once I decide on how to plinth each of these babies, I'm going to compare each one to my functional Lenco and decide for myself which one I like best. I'll probably discard the tts that fall short, but I expect to keep at least two up and running. If I could find an SP10 MkIII or a Pioneer P3 or P3a for reasonable prices, I would buy those too.