Slaw, your appreciation for the Rock reminds me of why it's been my only table for over twenty years now. It replaced a VPI HW-19 Mk.2, which I liked a lot. The legendary turntable master Brooks Berdan was my go to hi-fi guy, and I was not his only Rock owner. It's been a well-kept secret for a long time, with a cult following in the States (much like the Decca/London cartridge). In England it has a much higher profile, some of the long time hi-fi magazine reviewers and editors using it as their reference table. John Bamford of Hi-Fi News & Record Review has both a Rock Reference table and the massive Townshend loudspeakers, another of Max Townshend's brilliant designs. The Rock turntable is the result of a design program at a mechanical engineering college in England, looking at the job of a turntable from the ground up. Max Townshend acquired the rights to manufacture the table as a commercial product, adding some of his own ideas to the design.
One analogy made concerning it's sound is to that of a camera tripod. A camera mounted on a tripod of sufficient mass produces an image without the "blur" of a hand-held camera. Looked at in terms of the size of the groove modulations relative to the length of a tonearm, if a groove modulation were to be only less than an inch wide, the corresponding tonearm length would be many, many miles. While the back end of a tonearm is held firmly in place by it's bearings, the cartridge end is free to move freely, as it must. But it needs to be free to move only enough to allow it to follow and support the cartridge as it traverses the LP groove (both laterally, and vertically for LP warps), which is at very low frequencies (33 1/3 RPM is less than 2Hz). At higher frequencies (above the just mentioned mechanical frequencies, but below the arm/cartridge resonant frequency, ideally around 10Hz), the Rock front-end damping mechanically "locks" the tonearm's headshell to the table as securely as the rear-end bearings do the rear of the arm. Again looking at the arm in terms of it's size in relation to the LP groove, the headshell is vibrating like crazy, depending on it's design as to degree, in response to the mechanical energy being created by the cartridge and then passed into the headshell. The Rock damping absorbs and dissipates that vibration, removing it as a source of cartridge/tonearm-created "blur". The more energy a cartridge produces, the more of benefit is the Rock damping. It is for that reason the Rock is THE table for the Decca/London cartridges, which, being themselves undamped, create a huge amount of vibration, resonance, and microphony. But all cartridge/arm combinations have a resonant frequency, and the Rock damps that very effectively as well, whether the cartridge is microphonic or not.
But it's not just the headshell of the arm which is vibrating. The entire length of the arm is free to vibrate as well, creating resonances determined by the design of the arm. With the front end of the arm locked in place at audio frequencies, the ability of the arm to vibrate (and even, in strictly structural terms, bend) is drastically reduced. The criticism of the Rock from some (particularly the Linn crowd) is in it having an "overly-controlled" sound. I, myself, don't want to hear the ringing of undamped resonances, but that's just me! The damping trough is only one aspect of the Rock's unique design, but a major one.
Congratulations, Shaw, you are now a member of the Townshend Rock cult! Now, to really hear what's in your LP grooves, get yourself a London cartridge ;-).
