Holy fucking cow.
I have to admit to being in awe of someone making the investment in time and money for a setup such as this. I have a lowly Rega Planar 3, not fit even to sweep up the crumbs from under the turntable of this beast.
But it sounds pretty damn good to me.
Is the ROI (time/money) based on what you get back in sound worth it? (I can certainly understand the joy in operating such a behemoth)
Ha! Frankly buying that beast was a sort of Hail Mary in a way.
I'd had a good Micro Seiki DD-40 Turntable for a long while (hand-me-down from my father in law). I really liked how vinyl sounded on that turntable, though I'd say it edged more in to the "nostalgic" level of sound quality.
Once I found myself buying lots of records my audiophile tendencies kicked in, using it as an excuse to upgrade, just to see how good I could get vinyl to sound. This turntable came on the market at a very good deal, essentially brand new, new arm, new expensive cartridge. I could never afford all of it new and after a bit of research took a chance and went for it. On one hand I was skeptical that I'd realize much sonic performance, figuring there is only so much you can do with turntable design. On the other hand, knowing my upgrade itches, I saw it as an opportunity to leapfrog the gradual upgrade process and go for it. If it didn't work out, I got it at a good enough price to sell without a loss after trying it.
And I was just as happy anyway because it looked cool
As to the benefits, it was quite a change to a high mass turntable, with higher end arm and much more expensive cartridge. Not that any of that automatically buys you better sound. I can only report that subjectively it was very, very much worth the purchase for me. Sonically everything seemed to get better - lower noise (where there was always some level of record hiss playing a record on my old turntable, this could play back clean records essentially silently. The sound just seemed cleaner, clearer, that much closer to CD-like. The dense passages on records that, on the micro seiki, would seem to sort of get confused and hazy, like I was hearing through a slight haze of built up distortion, all sounded really clear, clean on this turntable. It didn't seem to matter how many instruments built up in a track, or how complex, I could hear every little element cleanly. So it certainly seemed to me to be a sonic upgrade.
Add to that, in person it really looks and feels like a million bucks - it screams that classic "German engineering" vibe, the fit, finish, precision of how it seems to operate.
Never in a million years would I ever advise anyone else to spend that kind of money on a turntable (especially what these cost new). But I can only say it worked out great for me. But...I can be nutty that way.
Oh, I'd also add: as to the turntable isolation base I built, most of it was solving a practical problem: I had to put the turntable on a pretty old fairly flimsy small Lovan stand, on a sprung wood floor, and vibrations from footsteps on the floor really disturbed a turntable when placed like that. My son's footsteps would easily skip records. So I tested tons of material for vibration absorption or decoupling, found that some spring based pods were by far the best, and then threw a bunch of material I'd already had together under the base in a sort of contrained-layer-damping idea. It worked very well, measurably reducing vibration getting to the turntable, and footsteps won't skip it any more. I would not claim any other sonic benefits from the base beyond that.
