I'm a Dummy, Tell Me About Turntable Mats

I can’t define tracking noise but I know it when I hear it. Except I’m not even sure of that.

@lewm Make sure you turn the volume all the way down, so you can only hear the mechanical sound of the cartridge playing the vinyl. The quieter it is, the better the platter pad, in a nutshell.


@fsonicsmith  You have mis-characterized my comments about the Technics, just so you know. I think its a very good deal. But I have a Triplanar on mine, as I feel the machine's weak points are the arm and the platter pad. Equipped with the Triplanar and a very different mat, it does an excellent job in comparison to my master tapes.

@fsonicsmith  You have mis-characterized my comments about the Technics, just so you know. I think its a very good deal. But I have a Triplanar on mine, as I feel the machine's weak points are the arm and the platter pad. Equipped with the Triplanar and a very different mat, it does an excellent job in comparison to my master tapes.

It was not intentional. I have already been corrected above by lewm. I do apologize. I have no doubt that a 1200 variant with a Triplanar arm can be a David amongst the Goliaths when it comes to price/performance. That is somewhat similar to my personal philosophy and yet paradoxically worlds apart. My hot rodded vintage idlers are night and day from a modern DD but I do focus on the arm and cartridge rather than the drive. 
And more to the point I continue to disagree that mats make a significant qualitative upgrade in SQ. 
Perhaps we should have a fun well-intentioned intellectual debate about the price/performance ratio of this https://www.audiogon.com/listings/turntables-shun-mook-audio-lp-clamp-legendary-record-weight-the-be...

It was not intentional.

@fsonicsmith  I didn't get the impression is was. I just though I should point out the issue, since the 'table is quite different if you have a good arm on it.


As far as the mat goes, its pretty easy to demonstrate with nothing more than a few different mats and a turntable that you can hear differences. You don't need amps or speakers for that. What a weight or clamp brings to the 'table (if you see what I did there...) is helping to keep the LP in contact with the mat so it can more effectively control resonance in the LP. Vacuum works even better, but the vacuum system I had damaged a lot of records (ticks and pops due to dirt pressed into the grooves on the backside of the LP; this was over 20 years ago) so on that account I've stayed away from vacuum systems.


The problem as I see it is that many aftermarket platter pads are no better than the one that they replace. So you get variable results. But if you hear one that actually does what its supposed to (as I described earlier) then there is no going back.

I'm with @fsonicsmith on this. No mat on my PAC oversized aluminum platter on a well-fettled 401. I've listened to graphite (dead), copper (pinched and dry), paper, rubber, quarters, vinyl, and many others. It may be totally different on other tables but on mine, bare platter sounds by far the best. 

I wonder why the Japanese used most of the time stock rubber for mats? 1200G does, my PD444 also, then they went to create all the others metal ones