The Project, Music Hall and Regas are all good belt-drive units. One advantage of those is they often come with less "massy" more sophisticated tonearms, so you can mount higher-quality phono cartridges that track at lower stylus pressures.
Also, some of those brands are supplied with mediocre Ortofon cartridges, which do not track as well as the top Shures, Grados and Stantons. US manufacturers still build the most linear, best-tracking cartridges (Shure, Grado, Stanton).
I recommended the Denon direct-drives for years back when I was editor of Sound & Vision magazine in Canada.
Regards,
Alan
