garrard vs clearaudio innovation

Hi orionpcgames, several considerations. If you are using a subwoofer you really have no choice. The Garrard will drive you nuts with rumble. Even if you do not have a sub the magnetic bearing on the Clearaudio is handily better. The Clearaudio is not a suspended turntable (neither is the Garrard.)  It will work well when placed on a solid footing from floor to stand. The usual problem will be a wood floor. Wood floors bounce and this will unsettle just about any non suspended turntables even the heavy ones. Fixed tables need to be on concrete floors. Some people will use wall shelves which can help but may not be perfect depending on the construction of the house. If you have wood floors you will be much happier with a suspended turntable like the SME or SOTA tables. SME tend to be very pricey but I think the 15 is in your price range. SOTA's are American made and much more reasonable. The new ones have a magnetic bearing just like the Clearaudio, vacuum hold down and an extravagant DC motor drive. The Cosmos is about the same price as the Clearaudio. The Clearaudio is a cool looking table and very nicely made. Their cartridges are top notch. The SOTA in the right wood like cherry, rosewood or Ebony are plain beautiful. You can jump up and down on wooden floors and neither the SME's or the SOTA will care at all. They will just go along like nothing happened. Put a Kuzma 4 point 9 on any of them and you will be in heaven.

Mike

Then after the AR turntable popularized belt drives and with the invention of electronically controlled motors and direct drive tables there was no longer a need for idler wheels to change speed. Idler wheels and rumble filters disappeared from the market. I'm all for nostalgia but if I ever get another TD 124 it will be for display only.

Well uberwaltz, you have an exceptional one I guess. The three that I have been witness to have had that problem. None of these people had subwoofers but if you watched their woofer cones at volume they were dancing around like man men, probably almost bottoming out.
Try turning up the volume and play a dead groove if you have one and watch what the woofer cone does. With a quiet table you will just see a little motion with a noisy one the cone will be dancing.
Back then their solution to the problem was a rumble filter. All the old high end preamps had one. 

My fathers Rek O Kut Turntable not only rumbled but it fed back like crazy. On the HH Scott Preamp the rumble filter was always turned on.
He had a custom cabinet made for the whole system and looking back the turntable was mounted poorly. It looked nice though and was hidden under a hinged cover. The end result was that he got a bunch of prerecorded tapes and listened mostly to his Ampex and what a wonderful machine that was. Instead of scratches you got hiss. No dolby back then and the prerecorded tapes ran at 7.5 ips. Other than that the sound was wonderful. I was in charge of demagnetizing it once a month.
Anyway, many modern subwoofers have room correction with equalization to push the driver as low as feasible. If there is any noise below 30 Hz it can get magnified as much as 10 dB. So you can see what turntable rumble might cause. My system is digitally rolled off at 80 dB/Oct below 18  Hz. If I remove the filter and play a dead groove the woofers will flap a bit even with the SOTA. When I turn the filter on the woofers go almost dead in the water. 
Uberwaltz, if you can look closely at your woofer membrane and play a dead groove with the volume up you will see it flapping back and forth. Shine a flashlight in there! I've never seen one strike the magnets but I suppose with enough power it could happen. Anyway because the Maggie is a dipole it has a lot of trouble producing sound below 30 Hz. It just cancels out. But the membrane is still flapping which is why I really like to see subwoofers and high pass filters used with Maggies. You have to use two subs and cross at 100 Hz or even a little above. I have used JL Audio Subs under Maggies with great results. Of course if you only listen to digital files none of this matters but then what are you doing on this thread:)
Lewm I think you are basically right about wasted energy and distortion.
You can make a bunch of improvements to those old tables and they are serious metal having been designed for commercial use but you still have two more bearings, the idler wheel itself and the capstan mechanically connected to the platter. In a belt drive you only have the spindle. Even assuming that all the mechanical part were as good as reasonably attainable the idler wheel table is still going to make more noise than an equally machined belt drive. Can you make an idler wheel table quiet enough to function well with corrected sub woofers? I don not know. I can only say that I have not seen it done yet but it is not impossible but probably very expensive:) 

Glen and just how will the Garrard be "much better" than the Clearaudio which not only is a belt drive but also has a magnetic bearing. It certainly is not going to be better on the rumble front. If you put the same tonearm and cartridge on both tables convince me that the Garrard is "much better."
Mulveling, my point exactly. Any fixed, un-suspended turntable needs a firm footing from the floor up. If you have it great, you have much more choice in fine tables if not a suspended table is mandatory for trouble free high performance.

Isn't that something noromance. I am not here to upset anyone or tell them what they should buy. By all means buy what you like. However, turntables are very simple mechanical devices. The simpler the better. No turntable can beat the laws of physics.
Norman, if you like dinosaur turntables knock yourself out. I can't use them because I have very powerful corrected subwoofers and a turntable like that would ruin everything. Garrards are cheap. I can buy over 5 of them for what my Cosmos cost and the Cosmos is a very fairly priced table given the competition. So maybe they will be worth a little more in the future. Still Cheap. None of the ultra high end turntables use an idler wheel drive. Do you think Tech Das would not be capable of making an idler wheel drive if they wanted to?? What about Walker or Clearaudio, or Basis, or SME. Watch what happens to VPI's half baked attempt! It will be gone in a few years. The idler wheel is a dinosaur. I'm all for collecting dinosaurs but I don't care to use one. If using one suits your purpose, wonderful.

Having said all that. The fact that there are so many still around speaks for the build quality of the Garrard and there is certainly a retro cool about them. Given the right Plinth, arm and cartridge I'm sure they can sound great. But, even brand new they rumble more than a belt drive.  I have a few 180gm pressings that most likely have more rumble than the old Garrards. Some hot shot gets his hands on an old lathe and thinks he is going to make high quality pressings on it never mind the thing has been in storage for 20 years an bounced all around town with it's 100 lb platter on. I have 6 "Audiophile" pressings like that and three of them are Ryko Discs. 

jam759, In the arm now is a Clearaudio Da Vinci v2. I have an Ortofon Windfeld Ti in the second head shell.

Slip mats were used on direct drive tables cleeds. Belt drive tables generally do not have enough torque to get started IMMEDIATELY like a cuing table needs to. You need to practice your disc jockey exercises cleeds and stop sticking your nose into things it nose nothing about:)

tzh21, speed accuracy can be excellent but they will always be noisier due to the multiple moving parts. Even if they start off relatively quiet wear on the idler wheel will eventually increase the noise (rumble).
Idler wheel tables persisted in the commercial world because it is easier to cue an idler wheel table. If you don't know how disc jockey's cued records, they held the platter still with their left hand, placed the tonearm on the record at the beginning of the cut they wanted to play then "jockeyed" the platter back and forth to the very beginning of the cut and right on time they let the platter go. Finally the idler wheel tables were replaced by direct drive units which were even better at this. You can not use belt drive tables this way. 
gavman there is no such thing as zero rumble in a turntable.