Building high-end 'tables cheap at Home Despot II

Dear Jean, With all due respect, and speaking as a happy owner of one of your Giant direct-coupled Lencos, I must nevertheless take issue with some of the bald statements you've made in this last post, many of which are repeated from previous posts. First of all, a quartz-locked drive system is naught but a servo system that is referenced to a quartz crystal oscillator. The quartz reference idea came along much later than the servo per se and was thought to constitute an important advance. With the quartz reference, the servo works better, not worse. (For example, the Micro Seiki DQX-1000 dd table is said to be superior to its predecessor, the DDX-1000, based on the quartz reference that distinguishes the former table from the latter.) Having said that, it's quite possible that you are correct in your ranking of the relative sound qualities of the various dd tables you discuss; your opinion carries some weight with me, because I believe you've actually listened to them all. However, your reasons why one dd table might sound better than another are pure speculation and should be labeled as such. (You invent an hypothesis to suit your listening results; this is bad science.) If you've done any actual experiments to compare a servo-drive with and without its quartz reference in the context of a given turntable, I'd sure like to know about them. (This is possible with my Denon DP80, and I intend to try it.) I just hate to think a newbie is swallowing the whole enchilada, so I felt it necessary to make a comment here. No animosity is intended. Carry on.

It's not bad science to invent an hypothesis to suit your observations. Of course that's what one does. But it is bad science (and an abuse of common sense) to do so without bothering to learn about the mechanisms at play in and around the phenomena under investigation, and it's bad science to promote your hypothesis as a result without testing it in a variety of ways. I've no idea whether Jean is at all guilty of this. Carry on all of youz.

Rnm4, you are correct. I misspoke. I should have written that Jean does propose his hypotheses as facts, without having done the experiments necessary to prove the hypotheses, as you also suggest. Or if he did them, he does not present the data.

I said:

"I've no idea whether Jean is at all guilty of this"

So you should not have said "Jean does propose his hypotheses as facts, without having done the experiments necessary to prove the hypotheses, as you also suggest".

And FWIW, and it's worth a lot, proof is out of the question here. This is the real world, not math.

Rnm4, I have and had no intention of starting a fight. All I'm saying is that when one says X is due to Y, Y ought to be true. If Y is not true, then it cannot be a cause of X. Without being specific, I take issue with some of Jean's Ys (his presuppositions). I did write the first time that by all means Jean is entitled to his opinion of these different dd turntables, and that in fact I respect his opinion as a good listener and one who has done a lot more critical listening than I have.