Quote Originally Posted by Marco View Post
Probably not in this country - and most of them would've been crap. Some of the truly awful 'cheap 'n' cheerful' D/D turntables which flooded the UK market in the 70s and 80s, often as part of 'midi systems', and the like, did the reputation of direct-drive no favours whatsoever!
I would like to add here that a great deal of "El Cheapo" turntables that were part of a huge number of horrendous "midi systems" were belt-driven; I'll give you two prime examples: an all-in-one radio/tape recorder/turntable stereo system (complete with two craptastic "speakers" that pretended to be full range and had no sound deadening inside AT ALL) that my father had bought at the dawn of 1980 or so. It was made by an Asian company named "Silver" (its badge looked a bit like a crown) and it was constructed out of a space-age material named... polystyrene. It had a floppy polystyrene platter, an even floppier subchassis (oh yes, it was a "suspended subchassis" affair, à la Dual CS-505), a tonearm with a polystyrene headshell and a chrome-plated wand of an unknown metal... That thing ruined many of my favourite records - literally. Would you like me to tell you more about its "performance"? Or the Sony midi system that was its successor to my parents' audio throne in the mid-'90s... Plastic everything... Yes, these were suspended, belt-driven turntables, as were many other such units; given the relatively low cost of developing a belt-driven turntable, I'd be inclined to expect the number of crappy "El Cheapo" belt-driven turntables that were destined to be part of "midi systems" to be greater than the number of direct-drive ones. Yet, despite this, it is only direct drive that gets a bad rap. Perhaps this is one of the cases when common "wisdom" is actually common myth.