Decades ago, Townshend Audio introduced a vinyl playback system (the Rock Reference, Issue 70), which, with design input from Jack Dinsdale and John Bugge at Cranfield Institute of Technology, included a way to damp the tonearm at the cartridge end via a trough of damping fluid that swung out over the record being played. This was one of those ideas that was so clearly good that one wonders how other people missed it. One wonders even more how, with the idea revealed, they kept on missing it. This is just the right way to do it for vinyl playback. The trough can be used with ’arms in general on other turntables—in effect, anywhere. Combine the trough with a Morch DP8 (with its uniquely correct moment of inertia behavior) and/or with one of the remarkable Pear Audio turntables or, say, with the Nakamichi TX1000 to solve the off-center problem, and one is well on one’s way to realizing at last the true possibilities of vinyl playback. Why the trough has not become universal is, indeed, an ongoing mystery, because this thing works.
