Top ten iconic turntables ...

[Martyn Miles]

No record has a 'sameness' when played on my AR XA.

 

[Tony L]

I believe it's this type of mass related ambience or atmosphere that you discuss above in a nutshell Tony that has brought me to move on from the LP12 and on to the P10. Thirty five years of different LP12's and upgrades and it took the P10 to help reveal to me that no upgrades can remedy the things I now find inherently flawed about the LP12. I'm not saying the P10 is perfect, no turntable is, but what it offers me is a refreshing new approach to music listening that's simply more neutral overall while retaining many of the things that I have always found to be very musical about the LP12. I find that every LP sounds uniquely different on the P10 where as on the LP12 every record played upon it took on this odd sameness air about it, taking with the extracted groove signals the added baggage of the fundamental deck construction itself.

I’d very much like to hear a P10 at some point as the thinking behind it seems so logical to me and aligns with a lot of my own views and theories as to why the stuff I like works, why the stuff I don’t doesn’t etc. No idea whether I’d actually like it though. I owned a first version P9 for quite a while and liked a lot about it, a remarkable deck in many ways, but in the end I just missed the scale, heft and slam of my old Linn so went down the rabbit-hole of trying to build my perfect LP12. I still really like and respect both turntables, though I’m not sure I like more recent Linns (certainly not liked them at shows etc, but I put little weight on that). I’m curious if the P10 can do that ‘you are in the studio control room’ big thing I like. I need that.

I’m very happy with my my ancient TD-124. For me it combines the absolutely rock-solid pitch and timing of the Rega with the slam of my old LP12/Zeta and clone Armageddon PSU and scale of the Spacedeck. The price is a little noise, and I’ll pay it. No idler is ever going to be as quiet as any of these belt-drive decks, but there is something just so ‘right’ with it and it is such a pleasure to use. I can’t see myself changing now unless the 124 ends up damaged or stolen somehow (I don’t think I have the energy to restore another to this level!).

 

[tpetsch]

I never had the pleasure to listen to a TD-124, so many people with solid views on why they like the things they like, really makes me want to hear these things. If you lived 50 miles away I'd swing by with my P10 and we could hear both in your system, I would get a kick out of that..