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Originally Posted by nikongod  anyways, i think that EVERYONE agrees that a change to the plinth/platter can be VERY significant, similarly for a change to the tonearm.
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To flesh this out a bit more. Until the 1970s most people assumed the only important thing a turntable (plinth / motorboard) did was spin at the right speed and had little influence on the sound. The cartridge was the most important thing and the relationship between cartridge and tonearm mass was where all the design efforts were being focused.
So the Technics, on the evidence of the figures quoted in another post above, being direct drive, would outperform any belt driven motorboard on this basis.
However it's more complex than this as Linn were among the first to point out. The actual motorboard and plinth have a large impact on the sound for the following reason.
Basically a turntable system is a seismographic instrument. It's function is to measure tiny vibrations and separate out the ones which you want to hear in the music from any others resulting from the mechanical inteface of the stylus in the groove or airborne or structural vibrations in the apparatus or it's surroundings.
Until this time most companies had just concentrated on the platter rotating at the right speed and being decoupled from the motor and left the siting of the whole device at the discretion of the user, in some cases even to the extent of the user having to design and build a plinth.
Common wisdom was that the plinth just needed to be as high mass as possible with just some judicious use rubber gromets in order to damp any vibrations. This also means of course that the plinth needs to be large and heavy, fashioned from as dense and acoustically inert material as possible.
Technics flagship SL-1000, the grandaddy of the SL series, sported a substantial obsidian (volcanic glass) plinth.
Linn, like Thorens and Acoustic Research, were designing a record player to be used in a domestic environment and argued that a suspended subchassis carefully tuned and built into an unassuming wooden plinth which could be placed on a light yet rigid piece of furniture resulted in the best sounding source.
But a decent supended subchassis is a complex thing to build and expensive so on a budget deck like the Rega and the cheaper Duals a conventional solid plinth with some rudimentary shockabsorbing feet was all you got.
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Originally Posted by nikongod it is no secret that rega is a tonearm company. they make tonearms as their #1 priority. they spent all of their money in the early 80's designing a SINGLE PIECE arm this is VERY good for removing unwanted flaws. their plinths (almost all of them) are surpassed by many others in the same price bracket.
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Rega's groundbreaking RB-300 tonearm was conceived as a means of making a budget turntable sound as good as possible. By addressing the problems with budget tonearms instead of trying to cut corners on suspended subchassis plinths like Dual and Thorens, they completely captured the lower end of the market.
Their original Planar 3 came with an arm made by Acos in Japan which looked very similar to almost every other standard tonearm at the time including the one on the SL1200.
By casting the arm in one piece they overcame many of the problems with cheaper tonearms at a stroke and revolutionised the market. The RB250 / 300 arms are actually quite rough and ready if you run your fingers over them and the casting is slightly crude but very effective and easier and less labour intensive to manufacture once the production is set up. It took SME's V and IV to carry these concepts to complete fruition.
At the time in the early '80s the Regas cost substantially less than the Technics SL1200, under half if memory serves. The Technics was a scaled down version of their broadcast decks which was originally offered as SL1200 with Technics tonearm or SL120 without tonearm and usually fitted with an SME 3009 or Series III.
The differences between then and now which account for the current prices of these turntables are more to do with the Technics having been adopted as an icon by millions of aspiring Hip Hop and House DJs the world over and selling millions of units into this market which it pretty much invented, while the market for audiophile turntables shrunk to a boutique one and prices spiralled accordingly.
Take this together with the current weakness of both the USD and Yen against the UKP and Euro and you have a miracle of Japanese mass production costing half as much as a low volume British built deck, the opposite of 30 years ago. The turntables themselves are little changed.
