Ring Clamps. What do you think?

How does a guitar sound with loose frets, fingerboard, bridge, or a delaminated soundboard? Not too good. The perimeter weight acts in a similar way as if you tightening and tune all the part of your guitar to allow it perform at its best.

Let's not compare an instrument that creates music to one that reproduces it. They have different functions.

Speakers maybe the closest to instrument tuning but turntables aim to playback what is in the grooves and eliminate as many extraneous variables as possible. There goal is to reproduce what the cutter created and to that point accurate extraction not added color via creating more resonate points.

Using a ring clamp is like any other skill, you get better with practice. I was terrified when I first started using the VPI ring clamp, but now it's like second nature, like driving a car. In truth, there is very little danger to the stylus when placing it on the record. It took me a lot of time to learn how to balance it so it is true rather than cocked. The likelihood of damaging a cartridge when lowering it is not much greater than if you cue it too close to the edge of an unringed record. For me, records sound a tad better with it in place, but I had a bigger jump in sound improvement from installing a Boston mat for 1/4 the price paid for the ring clamp.

I think a ring weight is great. I have a VPI and for many years I used a screw down clamp. The problem is that I always had to adjust the amount of pressure depending on the nature of any warp of a disk. Last year I switched to a TTWeights ring clamp and a center weight. I find that placing the ring and weight goes much easier than using the screw down clamp. You just plop them down and you're done; no adjustments. For me it's quicker. And the sound is noticeably improved. For one thing there is now more weight beyond the circumference of the platter giving extra fly wheel effect. The records are flattened and dampened. You don't want them "breathing," that is with air between them and the platter. I would never look back. As for bumping the stylus, I solved that completely with a small o-ring placed on the tonearm lift so that the stylus goes to the same exact spot on the lead-in grooves every time. Bumping is not an issue.

We will publish a spectral analysis report next week, this will show the huge reduction in record distortion and this project was done by a third party on an AMG V12 turntable.

We are engineers and then Audiophiles and only machine and build real products that do make music sound better by controlling vibration and absorbing unwanted energy in many different ways.

The record breathing as compared to a guitar is pure fiction and has no technical merit what so ever and is a pure opinion without facts. A record vibrates when not clamped it does not have sufficient mass to dampen itself and 90 % of record have some degree of warp thus this has been a century old problem.

We will prove it. Our Mat/Ring and center weight combination improved the factory V12 AMG dramatically!

Now the AMG will be replaced by our CU9999 Momentus and the purpose of this table is to reverse engineer from VINYL to tape where the master tapes have been lost.

The rim drive is the only table with rotational accuracy to do the job. Pretty cool and well engineered devices.
Thanks for all the support guys!

Larry