What's your age?

[f1eng]

I am 64. I retired at 60.
FWIW I started my career as a noise and vibration engineer and was an early user of computers in engineering, I wrote a programme to optimise racing car suspension geometry in 1971, which eventually led to a full time career in motor racing. 35 years in all. Before the motor racing I worked for Garrard on record players.
Astonishingly my hearing was not destroyed. It is better than average for my age, it must be genetic. My grandmother still had acute hearing at 100 years old. My wife who is a musician is going deaf.
Not fair really.

In my very early DJ'ing days we had an old Citronic "Disco Console", which featured slightly bouncy Garrad turntables.  (which ended up being crudely modified, with the auto functions removed, lead weights to allow Ortofon Pro cartridges to be used etc.)  As I recall, they actually sounded pretty good by the standards of the day.  - Perhaps some of your early work Frank?

No I worked in R&D looking into how external and internal vibration influenced the output from the pickup cartridge. We evaluated quite a lot of competing products too.
In 1976 Garrard had an engineer working on laser vibration measurement to look at the influence of this vibration and how design mods could influence it. Intriguingly some of the most effective details cost almost nothing to implement, cutting a slot in a critical place to change mode shapes and this sort of thing. Getting the plinth design such that the arm was mounted at a structural node for example. It is surprising how much structural vibration and environmental vibration showed up on the cartridge output. Our view was that measuring vibration was less important since putting accelerometers on the headshell, say, changes its dynamics so gives wrong data and in any case if the headshell is buzzing away in a fashion that does not alter the cartridge output it does not matter look somewhere else.
With good engineering these solutions could have been implemented inexpensively in mass production.
Garrard had a new young MD who wanted to change the way the company worked, by the time he had embelished his CV and moved on the company had been fatally wounded and was sold without any of the results of this work finding its way onto product. Shame.
Nowadays the market for record decks is far too small for mass production and most of the enthusiasts seem to only want expensive solutions!
I am not aware of any manufacturers today using the sophisticated engineering modelling which is available for this sort of design.
Most, if not all, seem to rely on beautiful craftsmanship and finish rather than sophisticated engineering. IMHO