There’s an enduring debate among the turntable-tech intelligentsia between opposing theories of turntable design. Some designers, notably Roy Gandy of Rega, follow a less-is-more approach, building stiff, lightweight turntables that release energy rather quickly. Others, such as Franc Kuzma, whose Kuzma Ltd. manufactures my reference Kuzma Stabi R turntable and Kuzma 4Point tonearm, believe in heavy mass-loading to dampen vibrations, including transparency-miring resonances. Though analog sages and savants have argued for decades, the question remains: Should turntables be light or heavy? Should you liberate or dampen internal energy to achieve perfect analog sound forever?
Here’s an equivocal answer: Both approaches can produce excellent, if quite different, sound. “The lightweight design approach is about PRaT, or Pace, Rhythm and Timing,” turntable setup whiz and new Stereophile contributor Michael Trei explained in an email. “A lightweight design doesn’t store as much vibrational energy, which in a high-mass design causes the resonances to linger for a more extended period, giving the turntable a deeper and more powerful but less rhythmically adept sound.” Consider Michael Fremer’s raves about Rega’s extremely light, $6375 Planar 10 (topped in Rega’s line only by the reference, carbon-fiber Naiad, priced somewhere around $45,000) and also the extremely heavy TechDAS Air Force Zero ($450,000 in its basic version).1
Clearaudio’s Reference Jubilee turntable ($30,000), which celebrates the company’s 40th anniversary, seems to employ both principles at once.
“Clearaudio founder Peter Suchy spreads the approach between resonance control, mass, and damping,” Garth Leerer of Musical Surroundings, Clearaudio’s US distributor, told me during a telephone call. “Clearaudio doesn’t use a massive steel platter in the Reference Jubilee; they use a stainless steel, flywheel subplatter. Clearaudio uses POM in the main platter, a material that has good resonance control and very low Q Factor: not much ringing. Sometimes,
