First…no offense taken! I am however not sure about the notion of “hidden ‘damage’” - most of the functions of a turntable are easily observable: does the platter spin reliably at the designated speed, does the signal travel cleanly to the phono stage without distortion, does the tonearm allow the needle to track accurately across the record surface. Any anomalies with any of these things are fairly obvious.

I am familiar with commodity turntables; I have a Yamaha YP-B2 which is clearly one of these…but it just looks sooo nice! The Technics SL-1600/1700/1800 line are not of the same ilk. I think they may have have been rebadged and sold by others but they were manufactured by Technics (Panasonic) and they were flagship products in their line. Their design has stood the test of time.

Good to know about the Rega. I remain intrigued by the Avid…

Very helpful, thank you. Edit: I am in the U.S.

I am pretty familiar with these Technics, I also have an SL-1600 in my second system. Both have been fully disassembled, cleaned, re-lubed, damping fluid topped off, auto-start/return positions adjusted, RCA cables replaced, cracked strobe lens replaced, etc. so I am not too concerned about these factors. I am more interested in gains I might receive through things like better isolation of the platter, tonearm damping, the ability to adjust tonearm height for better needle alignment, etc.

Thank you, exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for.