I don't think it is to do with price point, it is to do with image and fashion. Back when I worked for Garrard they priced everything on a price + margin basis. The 401 was £72 iirc. The new wave of audio subjectivism was just starting with Linn and Naim being the thing to have here in the UK.Do you think they're more of a rip off at the low or high end? Where is the price point of not a rip off these days?
We had a Linn in the lab for evaluation at Garrard and it was excellent but the cost guys said it would be cheaper to make than a 401 but Linn were selling for £300 at the time, presumably priced according to what you can get for it rather than the old cost + model.
Edit: we also had both Sony and Technics highe end direct drive and they performed brilliantly but would cost a fortune to make, which was a big shock at Garrard who wondered how we could compete. My boss ended up buying the evaluation Sony from the scrap man and I bought the SP10 (for £12). I had to re-assemble it, which was easy enough and convert to 240 volts and away I went. I ended up putting it in a skip when I moved house :end edit
I think that is how it is now, with the highest priced items probably being the worst. I heard (ie it may not be true) that one manufacturer of high priced items here in the UK was told by his far east distributors that one of his product lines did not sell well because it was not expensive enough (the other products were ludicrously expensive).
A good record player is expensive to engineer well but does not need to be expensive to make. A good distributed mass dynamic analysis of the system placed on different supports and using different cartridges is possible but I am not sure many, if any, of the manufacturers use it. This is a "hairy-arsed" engineering product class nowadays with buzz-words and largely technically ignorant reviewers holding sway.
I think there are rip off products at every price point as well as good ones.
Your Technics suggestion is probably a good one. Proper isolated TTs are not much in fashion at the moment.
I like the Gyrodeck but it has a round section drive belt, and I am always suspicious of what other more hidden bits of bad engineering practice may have been chosen by a designer who chooses such a drive system on anything but the very cheapest deck.
The Well Tempered arm makes more sense than most others, from a vibration transducer pov, at its price point.
A sapphire pivot, like in a watch, is a very good and very inexpensive bearing and was used in most of the inexpensive Garrard arms. Now I see it being mooted as something special on an arm costing the same as a car. Makes my blood boil.
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