[rfreiberger]

I can speak on this owning a pair of Technics 1200 mk2 I bought new in 1995 and a pair of Reloop RP8000mk2 I bought two years ago. What might be confusing is many DJ turntables are made by the same company now, and are reffered to as "super oem", so the small things are changed, like logos, but they come from the same factory. My Reloops weight close to the same amount as the Technics but the base allows for more rumble through the feet. If you tap the body, you can clearly hear this compared to the Technics.

The tonearm on the Reloop has bearing that have a small amount of play, on my Technics, they are extremely solid after 100's hours of play time. But the biggest issue is the Reloop has the flutter at 0.5%, while the Technics at 0.05%. Doesn't sound like a huge issue, but when playing a song on Reloop, the beats per minute will fluctuate from 100 to 100.5 to 99.5, non-stop. The Technics has the same flutter but at a much lower tolerance, so you don't see this appear. Performance, they both do well on startup and stop, and of course improved RCA jacks.

[unwind]

Uh, speaking as a mere human, can you actually hear the music shift in tempo from 99.5 to 100.5 bpm? Or does this become apparent when using tools/mixers/whatever to work with the audio stream?

I just quickly tried this on Google's built-in metronome widget (TIL) [1] and I can't hear the difference between 99, 100 and 101 bpm. However, the switching is discrete (the audio stops and restarts) which probably makes it much harder to detect change, of course.

Just curious, not trying to question your comparison of course.

[1]: https://g.co/kgs/Qqdz4d

[rfreiberger]

I personally cannot tell, if I was mixing vinyl I honestly would never have known about this. But using a digital vinyl system like Serato which displayed the bpm as 100.0, it's very apparent the tracks will fluctuate. The other issue is since your turntable is keeping time, two of them playing the same BPM, say 100BPM can drift 1BPM in theory. That's a large number when playing slower songs like hip-hop, and easily cause drift within 15~30 seconds. It's not a big deal, most dj's ride the pitch fader but it's worthy of a mention that the Technics 1200's are just over engineered.

[Intermernet]

If you're trying to beat match 2 tracks, and they're playing together for more than a few seconds, this becomes frustrating. A test I do is play 2 copies of the same record simultaneously and see how long it takes to noticeably go out of sync, given all other variables matched as closely as possible.

[dopamean]

I can definitely hear it when I'm performing. However even as a dj if I'm on the dancefloor having a good time it's mostly imperceptible.

[tinus_hn]

You might not notice the speed change but most people will definitely notice the accompanying pitch change.

[ace2358]

How would something like the audio technica lp1240 stack up? I’ve heard great things about them but they don’t seem super popular.

[letier]

That one should be a Super OEM and therefore similar to the others.