Baby you can drive my car(tridge)

While I was coming to grips with this month's review subject, the idler drive Garrard 301 Advanced, I began to think about the various methods that have been used to spin turntable platters over the years. Since the transition a century ago from windup clockwork to electric motors, there have basically been three ways to spin a turntable platter: idler drive, belt drive, and direct drive. True, there have also been a few designs that go their own unique ways, such as the rare, water-driven Oasis made by David Gillespie of Saturn Audio in the late 1970s and the gear-driven H.H. Scott 710 I once owned and foolishly sold. But almost everything made since the 1950s uses one of the three main drive systems. Even the Omega Drive system, which was used by Wilson Benesch on their extraordinary GMT One turntable, is at its core a direct drive design.

- BY MICHAEL TREI

For a long time, I had the mistaken belief that pretty much every turntable made before the mid-1950s used an idler wheel to drive the platter. While that's mostly true, some professional turntables well before that time could be accurately described as direct drive, coming more than 30 years before the Technics SP-10 was introduced in 1970. These professional transcription turntables were used mostly by radio stations and other professionals and came in a waist-high metal cabinet that probably weighed more than the radio-station engineer who operated it. One of the most popular of these was the RCA 70-D transcription turntable. Its massive 16" platter was connected by a long metal rod to a grapefruit-sized motor at the bottom of the cabinet. Motor noise and rumble breakthrough could be an issue, but because they were playing mono records, the cartridges had little sensitivity to the mostly vertical vibrations.

When stereo records arrived, in 1958, those vertical vibrations became a big problem, because the new stereo cartridges measured both vertical and lateral movement to create a stereo signal. Belt-drive turntables isolated the motor from the platter, so they quickly became the standard.

While the first belt-drive turntable was one of those big transcription jobs with a 16" platter—it was called the Components Corporation Model 70, introduced in 1954—it was the 1961 Acoustic Research AR that set the path for consumers. The budget-priced AR with its belt drive and three-point spring suspension became a legend, and even 20 years later, when I was in college, I knew several students who had brought their parents' old AR with them for their dorm systems.