$7K to spend on new turntable + arm

BPowers, I have read most of the posts here, and I see no recommendation for the Feickert turntable that you say is your current "favorite" in the race. Why and how did you come up with that idea? You would be taking a flyer on an unknown quantity that might be difficult to re-sell.

I don't own any of the tables under consideration and have never heard most of them, but based on my ideas of what constitutes good turntable design, I would cast my vote with Basis. And the Vector 4 arm is an excellent design. This is if you want to stay with belt drive. Otherwise, the Brinkmann Bardo direct drive, which could also be coupled with the Vector tonearm or any of several others, might knock your socks off, if you wear socks.

I will answer for Stringreen: A unipivot is less "stable" than a gimbal bearing or linear tracking tonearm with respect to azimuth. True, the action of the stylus tracing the groove can cause the azimuth to "creep" during play. However, none of the modern unipivots are without some mechanism or another to prevent or ameliorate that problem. I don't think your earlier statement that the "VPI tonearm" is "unstable" is quite fair, if this is what you were thinking about, because it infers that there is some unique problem with the VPI. The VPI tonearm is a unipivot and therefore it has to deal with that issue, just like any other unipivot. However, some of the finest tonearms ever made are in fact unipivots. All tonearm designs are compromised in one way or another.

BPowers, I have no dog in this fight. I don't own any of the turntables under discussion, and none of them would interest me. However, when you say your VPI runs a bit slow, I hope you do realize that one of the tremendous benefits of a proper motor controller, first and foremost, is to allow you to adjust speed. If you are set on getting a belt-drive table, I very strongly recommend that you spend some additional money on a fine quality motor controller. I would even go so far as to say that you might compromise on the cost of the tt in order to be able to afford the controller. Many companies sell an optional accessory controller to go with their belt-drive product. If you can ascertain that said controller really works well, buy it. (But beware; there is some crap out there in controller world.) Some of the newest products "come with" a good motor controller. You want the capability of the controller to match the type of motor. For example, a 3-phase synchronous motor demands a complex controller that can supply the juice in phase, optimally.

The question should be not whether the platter spins at exactly 33.33 rpm with no load on the system (because that's usually fixable with a good controller) but how it acts when subjected to the constantly variable load seen while you play an LP. If you do some research on this forum, you can find some info on which turntables do that well and which do not.

Why should a footfall put spurious 60Hz signal on your speakers, unless that's the resonant frequency of your current set-up. "60Hz" is typically hum from improper grounding, and it's usually constant.

Dr. Feickert's tables exist in the real world, ergo they are as subject to footfalls,etc, as is anything else in the real world. I guess you have faith that they are well isolated from such external disturbances. That's fine; I wouldn't know about the Feickert table.

I was not inferring that the VPI Controller specifically is the best choice. However, I urge you to consider that a good controller is far far from a "secondary solution", especially with a belt-drive turntable. Adding a controller properly designed to supply the AC needs of your tt motor is a MAJOR upgrade, if you did not have one prior. It's tantamount to spending $10K on your tt when you actually spent $5K, altho the analogy is inadequate to describe the difference. One of the best of the "simple" controllers is the Walker Audio Precision Motor Controller. Most who have heard both say that the Walker is a bit better than the VPI. I refer to it as simple because it does not have the capability to split phase to supply a 3-phase AC synchronous motor optimally. However it will work with such motors. I used it on a Nottingham Analog Hyperspace (which also should be on your list, incidentally). It made a huge improvement in midrange and bass clarity, separating musical lines, etc. It also revealed the effect of AC phase on motor performance. (The Walker has a switch to reverse AC phase by 180 degrees.) I was shocked by the improvement.