Reason for buying old/classic turntables

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.

Sheesh Lew, the only thing you're missing is an Empire...

IMO/IME, none of the vintage turntables bring home the music like a new table does, unless they are updated/modified/tweaked/whatever. But then they do quite well.

I hope everyone is having a good set of holidays!

The analogy with vintage automobiles is restricted to cosmetics only. Contemporary cars are much more evolved than the old ones, or aren't they? Contemporary turntables are not better per se than the vintage ones. Of course classic cars are very very nice (more elegant cosmetics than the modern ones). I think my Mercedes-Benz 500E looks better than the W210 series (with the ridiculous oval headlights).

Chris