Vinyl: I am warming to the concept … should I upgrade my deck?

One of my decks is a Debut III which has been upgraded with the Project acrylic platter, a Speedbox and a Denon DL110 cartridge as well as the arm being rewired. I find it very good – better than the two Rega Planar 1’s we have and not a million miles off my LP12. I suspect you could spent a lot of cash to upgrade your deck for relatively limited results.

Personally I’d be tempted to start with a cartridge change – the Carbon is a great budget cartridge but something like the DL110 is a significant upgrade in my experience.

The springs aren’t perfectly cylindirical so rotating them puts the deck under different tensions.

I still don’t see how that works, between 2 parallel surfaces…?

They seem to be fighting against each other.

Buy a mantra and try it…

A scientific explanation must exist…

The two best-sounding decks IMO are the Rega and the Xerxes. I’ve seen Xerxes with Rega arm on eBay for £700 or so.

Suspended decks can be tricky to get sounding good, and inconsistent between different records.

@cynic-al Problem with springs in the TD160/LP12 is that the suspended part of the deck can rotate as it bounces. Rotating the springs can alleviate that problem and get a vertical bounce.

Still leaves the belt/motor driving the suspended sub-frame. Xerxes is an elegant solution to the problem.

80s vinyl does seem to be particularly crap. Thin and poor resolution.

Oh, believe me, it was! The 80’s oil crisis meant albums were pretty much flexidiscs, some you could actually shine a light through, you could bend them until the opposite sides touched, and I had occasional copies with bits of paper embedded in the vinyl where returned stock was ground up and recycled without removing the label part in the middle.
Someone mentioned hearing tracks on the other side, that’s more likely pre-echo, where you can hear the start of the next track in the silent groove between tracks – I used to use that as my cue for pressing the pause/record button on my tape deck when making mix-tapes!
Modern vinyl is going to be much higher quality, 180gm, virgin plastic, but at a much, much higher price; I bought seven CD’s in Bath HMV today, cost me £65; you might get three vinyl albums for that…