The Townshend Rock 7 is the latest in a long line of affordable variants on the Rock theme – turntables that feature a damping trough full of silicone fluid that sits over the record.

This range started with the original design at the Cranfield Institute of Technology, which became the first Townshend Rock in the early 1980s.

The trough remains the same but the rest of the turntable has been through at least six iterations including the mighty Rock V that we reviewed and rated back in 2008.

In an attempt to build a turntable that is affordable and also incorporates the key technologies that underpin the Rock V, Townshend has decided to offer the Rock 7 in trough-less guise.

The cost is £999, but it doesn't really live up to its billing until you spend another £499 and add a trough, so we decided to review the system as a whole.

The Rock 7 is based around a solid steel plinth which is supported on three pneumatically damped, sprung feet. These are the same feet that are found on the Rock V albeit hidden within the heavily damped chassis.

They consist of a large coil spring within a rubber bellows that has small holes at the top and bottom, these holes slow down the rate at which the springs can move and thus damps the system so that it doesn't bounce up and down like more conventional suspended-sub-chassis turntables.

The feet are designed to keep vibrations in the surface that supports the turntable away from the platter, tonearm and ultimately the bit that reads the vinyl; the stylus.

As the fluctuations in the groove on a piece of vinyl are minute, any vibration that gets to the platter or cartridge via the tonearm will add to the signal being traced by the stylus. So it's essential that the stylus/vinyl interface remains as free from external resonance as it can be. The trough is there for the same reason.

One unusual feature of the Rock 7 is the counter balance on the left hand side of the plinth. This is an adjustable arm where you can add mass to in order to balance the weight of the tonearm and cartridge. It seems a little strange, but that's because there is no adjustment available with the suspension feet.

All other suspended turntables offset this inherent imbalance by offering adjustment of the springs that attach a sub-chassis to the main plinth. Here everything sits on the suspension and while it is possible to adjust the feet to a degree, it's not enough to compensate for the weight of the arm and arm base, which is where the counter balance comes in.

We used an old-style Rega RB300 tonearm on the Rock 7 which required quite a bit of ballast to balance out. Fortunately, the suspension works more effectively with more weight on it. The Rock V for instance, weighs significantly more than this turntable, yet sits on very similar springs.

The Rock 7 has the same platter material as the V, not acrylic, but high-density polyethylene in a distinctive white finish (it was going to be black, but that proved to be too revealing of finger marks). The platter is 39mm thick and differs from the Rock V in lacking a glass layer underneath it.

It sits on a sub-platter in the same material and this rests on a precision, ground-steel bearing in a brass journal. Townshend supplies 'state-of-the-art synthetic oil' to keep it running smoothly.

The motor is suspended on Nytrol bands within a free-standing case with adjustable feet, driving the sub-platter via an o-section belt and pulleys for the usual speeds. The on/off switch is on the same box.

Townshend makes arm bases for Rega, Linn and its own Excalibur II arm as standard, but can supply bases for other arms if required. With all but Townshend arms, you need to clamp the headshell with an outrigger that sits in the silicone goo.

As this is an intrinsic part of the system, it needs to be fixed precisely and solidly. But it also has to be positioned so that the cartridge is aligned, fortunately the outrigger's straight edge makes the alignment process somewhat easier than is usually the case.

Setting up the Rock 7 from scratch proved a little tricky for us, but we have given plenty of feedback to Townshend on how to clarify the instructions. To be fair, we had the earliest example that we could prise out of the company, so didn't expect the smoothest ride. It's essentially quite straightforward: fit the bearing through the sub-platter, clean and oil the journal and let it bed down.