What Turntable

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

yep , those direct drives with noisy resonant metal platters and an electrical sub station milimeters from those delicate moving coils are the personification of no compromise design

Sorry but you don't understand, as I have said many times before just because something is direct drive doesn't make it good, only good direct drives are good. If you want a good direct drive then go for top or near top of range and buy by weight - the heavier the better. Cheap light plastic direct drives are just that, and are crap. Also you need to understand how field propagates, I am afraid you are just applying Linn propaganda, not reality. The coils in a direct drive motor create horizontal fields not vertical fields. It is very easy to test by listening in the run out groove where the hum should be loudest, and the only cart where I have heard it with the PL71 is not a MC but a MM, my Decca London Super Gold, but that thing is notorious for hum pick up.

[jammy395]

Hum..........Is a science unto its self
I was plagued with hum using Thorens - and my stallwart G1042 / Sonneteer Sedley........A bit of 1.5mm Earth between cases and down to rack (steel) did help
a bit, but whether a mains thing or not after midnight things improved quite dramaticaly.........
System (see below) not a thing...............Silence is indeed Golden...........And no earthing required.......I geuss if it s right its right.
Strange........

BUT WHAT CAUSES IT.............?

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

The bad fairies!

[jammy395]

Not Fairies.... ...Dwarfs (sorry verticaly challenged wee folk tee hee) Troll's, Pixies, Banshee's, Ghoul's, Gobblin's,
Etc etc............. possibly

But to be serious after all theese years ....wtf....why .............Is it incurable.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Obviously not as it doesn't do it anymore - the fairies obviously now approve of your system

I always found it interesting that Gimli was portrayed in the films with a Scottish accent

[terrybooth]

As was the commander of Red October. Or was that simply because Sean doesn't do accents. :?
Anyway, back to the thread. Has Captain Black secured a PL71?

[applemarc]

Looks as if I have just bought a Pioneer PL-71

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

[Lindsayt]

...When I bought my EMT 930 and shoe-horned a Denon DL103 into it I expected it to sound better than my LP12 Cirkus Lingo 2 / Ittok LVIII / Troika and worse in others. After all the EMT only had an £90 cartridge in it whilst the LP12 had one that would have been £1000 ish new.

Well the EMT had better bass, making the LP12 sound wooly. Better clarity. The LP12 presented instruments as a lozenge shaped cloud, whereas the EMT was able to put some space between each individual instrument. Tonally the Denon sounded like the upper midrange and treble were sucked out compared to the Troika. Also the LP12 had that pleasant small bell like hypnotic sweetness to the upper midrange which was flattering on some recordings, but in general I prefered the crisper presentation of the EMT.

When I replaced the Denon with the more tonally even (and much more expensive) EMT TSD15 SPH cartridge I could find no area where the LP12 sounded better and plenty of areas where it sounded worse.

So I discovered that the LP12 never had been "the best turntable in the world". It had been beaten by one that was first made in 1956!


Initially I used my EMT 930 with my EAR 834p phono amp. This was after reading the opinion of one pfm member that the 834p would out-perform the inbuilt EMT 155st phono amp of the 930. When I did a small bake-off of my EMT930 against an EMT 948. I prefered the 948 - which has its' own inbuilt phono amp. This prompted me to connect up my 155st which I strongly prefered to the EAR. The EAR had woolly bass and indistinct treble. Midrange was equally good but different on each. Big lesson there. Don't trust the opinions of hi-fi forum posters. Especially ones that are expressing opinions on the basis of what they've read or been told, and not on what they've actually heard for themselves in their own systems. Even then, you can't always trust their opinions as I was shown when I took my EMT-Denon to a bake-off against an LP12 Cirkus Radikal / Ittok / Troika, an SP10 / SME 12" / AN Io Ltd, Nottingham Dais, sick Pioneer PL71, Thorens TD 150. I thought that the EMT was best in that bake-off for bass clarity, bass punch and midrange and bass dynamics. It just motored and bounced along in a way that no other tt there could match. Try getting some of the other attendees of that bake-off to admit that! Ha! Psychology and forum politics!


When I saw an EMT 950 for sale on German ebay in reconditioned "Top Zustand" condition with a low hours EMT TSD 15 SFL I bid for it, not expecting to get it and ended up winning it for £2250. Fantastic! So that year we went on a camping holiday to Italy via Austria to pick it up. It's owner was a professional violinist who had a passion for mono recordings. His main reason for selling is that he wanted a TT that could take 2 arms for the convenience of playing stereo and mono. He had bought the most expensive TW Acustic turntable with highly expensive arms and cartridges. He had the hugely expensive Wilson Dalek shaped speakers in his main system, with £multi thousand North American solid state amps. I wondered if Quad Electrostatics would have been better for his musical tastes? It was interesting to hear his thoughts on the EMT compared to the TW, which he said sounded similar but with the TW having a slightly wider soundstage. This is in marked contrast to the UK TW dealer who claimed on pfm that the top TW turntable was "streets ahead" of the EMT 950. When I asked this dealer if he had ever directly compared the 2 tt's he ignored my question. Ha! Forum marketing!

When I got the 950 home I found that it sounded similar to the 930 - as you might expect from 2 well engineered TT's with the same arm and the same cartridge. I had a slight preference for the bass of the 930 and a slight preference for the better midrange clarity of the 950, combined with the absolute locked-on feeling of pitch accuracy and stability on records with centre-punched holes with the 950. I also found that I could make the 950 sound better by swapping the EMT SFL cartridge for the SPH one at the expense of worse tracking. Better as in a bit more magical, more alive. Like a more extreme roller coaster, but one that was struggling to stay on the tracks at times.


The EMT quenched my thirst for hi-fi equipment that was vintage, looked undomesticated, was professional, international, and most of all: under the radar for the UK hi-fi press and general buying public. This lead to me trying out items from Bozak, Ashly, Coincident, Lightspeed, Promitheus, Pioneer, EV, Urei, Denon, Studer...

[zebbo]

Well all I can do is get technical with you. The problem with belt drive is belt compliance, and there is no way around it as a rubber belt has to be compliant. There is a very expensive way around it which is to use a cord instead of a belt, but that needs massive heavyweight construction and big motors. Some ultra expensive German turntables use this system and it does solve the problem. So the PT still has a rubber belt which still has compliance, all the extra pulleys do is change the phase (resonance) of that compliance, as when the belt goes over each pulley it will change the phase, this doesn't solve the problem and there is an argument it can make it worse. The Voyd system where those extra pulleys are powered means as long as the motors are in phase the belt resonance stays in phase. The advantage being that each small bit of belt between each motor is independent of the next one, so is shorter and so a higher frequency resonance so taking it above the usual belt drive musical problem areas such as piano.

I am afraid belt drive of what ever ilk is one enormous musical compromise. Though like most things you can get used to it, and as in the case of Linn be brainwashed into thinking it is right and anything without that warble and bounce is wrong

I understand all the theory as to why DD should be better but I've just looked up the specs for a Pioneer PL-71 and a Linn LP12 and the wow&flutter figures are about the same..... :?