Townshend Audio Rock 7 Turntable (TAS 209)

Trough Luck

The original Townshend Rock Reference turntable is one of the legends of audio. Unusual and inventive in design, fabulous in sound, but never widely available, the Rock Reference is now a rare collector’s item. Its less expensive successor, the Rock III, also offered extraordinary sound quality and many of the same unique design features (my review is reprinted here. Now the legend continues with the arrival of the Rock 7 and continues unabated: The Rock 7 is one amazing turntable design. Anyone coming anew to Townshend’s design ideas will be immediately intrigued. And everyone, whether familiar with earlier versions or not, will be deeply impressed by the sound.

All the Townshend turntables have incorporated a unique approach to arm-damping, involving viscous damping at the front end of the arm, right next to the cartridge, using a distinctive damping trough. (Detailed explanation in a moment). When one thinks about it, what could be more logical? One wonders why the idea is not almost universally applied. If you wanted to stop something from vibrating, wouldn’t you grab it directly rather than attach a stick to it and hold on to the far end of the stick? And of course a cartridge is supposed not to vibrate at audible frequencies at all, to sit absolutely still except for the motion needed to remain centered over the groove as the record plays. And yet this totally logical and singularly effective idea is unique to Townshend Rocks, outside of a brief appearance years ago in a Mapleknoll model only briefly available.

The trough-damping gives a solidity to the sound that one seldom otherwise encounters in vinyl playback. The arm in the Well Tempered Amadeus, with its bearing via damping only, comes close. And absolutely non-resonant arms with more conventional bearings and correct damping like the Moerch series can also perform superbly. But the front-end damping adds something special. And the front-end damping can be added to any arm! The Townshend front-end trough damping is an add-on: the “paddle” is attached via the cartridge mounting screws, so any tonearm can be used on the Mark 7 complete with trough. (Strictly speaking, the trough is an option, but you would be unwise to omit it.)

The new Townshend has, true to its ancestry, the characteristic Townshend sound—the uniquely solid sound characteristic of mastertape and live mike feed, the sound that once heard is never forgotten. The table is straight-forward to set up and the setup is completely stable. The only slightly tricky point is that the motor housing, which is a separate unit, needs to be leveled carefully so that the (round) belt does not travel up and down the driving surface on the sub-platter. But once this is set, it stays set. Once set up, the turntable works easily and consistently. And the sound…. ultra-silent background and imperturbable solidity.

How it Works

Let’s take a quick walk around the operational features. The table is suspended on springs. These are adjustable, but it is recommended that they be set to maximum and that leveling be done by moving and then locking an ingeniously mounted weight on the side of the turntable, opposite the arm-mounting, which weight can be moved in two dimensions horizontally, so that the turntable can be leveled front to back and side to side using this single weight, which is then locked into position. This system is easy to use, and completely effective, absolutely stable and not a source of spurious vibration. The motor is in a separate box that sits next to, and slightly behind, the table. (As noted, this box has to be carefully leveled to get the speed stable, but once this is done, speed stability is very good; in the higher version of the table to come [see below], speed stability will be even more stable, so to speak.) The motor drives a subplatter by a belt, the subplatter using a tight-tolerance sleeve-bearing with a micro-layer of oil drawn up from a well at the bottom.. This gives in effect a subplatter riding on a fluid layer—ultra-low noise. The platter slips over the outside of the subplatter shaft that contains the bearing sleeve. The record is clamped to the platter by a screw clamp.

The distinctive trough damping works as follows: With the record put on the platter and clamped down, the trough full of damping fluid is swung over above the surface of the record. The trough is in the shape of a circular arc, so that as the arm travels across the record, the “paddle” (actually a small tube) that is attached to the front of the arm sticks down into the damping fluid and moves through it as the record plays. When you are through with the side, you raise the arm with the cuing device, swing the arm out to its side position, swing the trough off to its side position out of the way and you are ready to remove the record, and play another.