Before I bought my current turnable, a Merrill Williams R.E.A.L. 101.2, I read a review or two. I don’t place a lot of stock in reviews, but it can be reassuring to hear someone say something nice about a piece of equipment I’m going to buy, even if I’ve pretty much already decided on it. In this case, the reviewer praised many of the turntables strengths, including the fact that he didn’t feel the need to spend time isolating the 101.2 as its design featured an already well isolated platter.
Indeed the 101.2 does do a better job of isolating the platter than my last turntable – it is much less sensitive to footsteps and slamming doors. But isolating a turntable, or really any piece of equipment, I was to discover, goes WAY beyond making it less sensitive to footfalls and room vibrations.
A friend of mine who’s been at this analog audiophile hobby for a lot longer than I have has tried out a number of different isolation shelves and footers over the years and found one, the Townshend Seismic Isolation Platform, to be head and shoulders above the rest. Normally I put even less stock in what my audiophile friends tell me than I do in reviews, but in this case my friend was on a serious roll providing consistently sound guidance that had helped push my system forward much further and faster than I’d ever thought possible.
He recommended I put a Townshend platter under both my turntable AND my integrated amplifier. I hedged and bought one to test the water. When the platter arrived, shipped from the UK in record time and extremely well packed, I cracked it open and read the manual as I considered where to put it first.
I had a set of Aurios Pros Isolation bearings under both my turntable and my amp, and with the aforementioned review of my 101.2 still in the back of my mind, I decided to try it under the amp first, thinking that the turntable was already pretty well isolated. What it would do under my amp I had no idea, as I’d never heard more than modest improvements in sound by adding the various isolation footers under my electronics I’d tried over the years. Of those that I had tried, a list that includes Ayre Myrtle Blocks, BDR Cones, Symposium Rollerbock Jr’s and the Aurios Pros, it had been the Aurios I’d gotten consistently the best results with. Nevertheless, I was utterly unprepared for what I heard with the Townshend Seismic Isolation Platter.
Great records require great recordings, and great recordings are those done with great microphones and proper placement of those microphones in great recording venues. When we hear a performance truly reproduced well, we can appreciate the way the recording engineer optimized the use of microphones in the recoding space to bring the performances of the artists and their work to life. The Townshend platter made dramatically more apparent the location of each instrument in relation to the microphones used, and the way in which the instrument or vocal sounded in that space when the performances were recorded.
The effect of using the Townshend platter was a HUGELY satisfying fleshed out realism. With the platter under my amp, musicians and vocalists came to life, while sounds on some recordings that I’d paid little or no attention to before now became recognizable as instrumentation, serving to enhance the quality reproduction of the other instruments and vocals in the mix. The improvements in sound I got using the Townshend platter were there with just about any record I threw at it, from every genre, but it was with classical records I experienced the greatest impact.
A couple of years ago I was recommending to one of my readers a classical record I had gushed over here. He told me his system just didn’t reproduce classical music that well, and that he avoided classical records for that reason. He said that the music would get too muddled to make sense of it all.
If I were having that same conversation now, I would STRONGLY URGE him to try the Townshend Seismic Isolation Platter. My best classical records sounded DRAMATICALLY richer, clearer and with the sound of the hall better integrated. The Townshend platter made the sound of my system more transparent, and as such it was much more obvious to me where each part of the orchestra was and what it meant to the performance. Meanwhile, a few classical records that I’d found rather underwhelming before I had the Townshend platter, went from the sell pile straight back into regular playing rotation.
One record in particular is an RCA Living Stereo pressing of Jascha Heifetz performing Vieuxtemps’s Concerto No. 5 in A Minor. The record features Sir Malcom Sargent conducting the New Symphony Orchestra of London behind Heifetz, and it had impressed me with its conveyance of Heifetz’s violin while leaving me wanting a great deal more from the sound of the orchestra. With the Townshend platter under my amp, the violin was bigger, fuller, better placed and more lifelike, and the sound of the orchestra and the hall snapped into focus behind it. I was now “seeing into” the performance, a startling improvement for a record I’d all but given up on.
I decided to see what would change if I put the Townshend platter under my turntable and put the Aurios Pros back under my amp. Much to my delight and surprise, the overall sound of my system was even better, offering yet more of the wonderful qualities the platter had brought to my system under my amp. As I sat back listening to my system with the Townshend platter under my turntable, two things were becoming increasingly clear to me. The first was that my Merrill Williams 101.2 was not as well isolated as I’d thought. The second was that I was going to need a second Townshend platter under my amp, just as my friend had recommended.
I honestly can’t think of any change I’ve made to my system, outside of a substantial upgrade to my speakers (Verity Parsifals) and upgrading my turntable (which set me back close to $10k!), that has brought about such a dramatic improvement in clarity, high frequency resolution, bass definition, improved imaging, transparency and overall musicality. At just under $1k the Townshend Seismic Isolation Platter is worth every penny and more!