Help me audiophiles- Which turntable should I buy?

[Darius]

I'm new to vinyls, in fact i've never even heard one. Recently i've been listening to loads of music with my Monster beats and shure SE530's with graham slee voyager amp. Everyone says how vinyls have a much nicer, warmer sound and I would really like to get a turntable. But to be honest I really have no idea about vinyls and turntables, I'm 16 so I missed out on the vinyl generation, all I know is digital. So for someone in my position, what would be the ideal setup for listening to vinyls nowadays? I have plenty of space in my room. Also, can you use headphones and plug them straight into the turntable? Speakers too? I really don't know much about them sorry =(

Any help is much appreciated, THANKSSSSS

p.s It's my Birthday today =)

Oh yeah and I'm willing to spend up to about £250 maybe a bit more
By the way, when I buy something like this, I want to make sure I'm getting the best of the best, the creme de la creme, the cream of the crop. I want to ensure I will be blown away when I listen to the vinyls, just looking at the vinyls makes me smile =)

 

[Alan]

In you budget, a cheap turntable should be sufficient. I'm using a Denon DP300F which should be in your budget. However, I spoke with a US vinyl dealer who refused to sell anything other than $99 Audio Technicas because for the low end he said there was no better table. He's probably right. The technology has been stable for decades.

When you buy your table, make sure you can afford to replace the stylus periodically. I'm using aftermarket elliptical needles for slightly better sound, but they cost me $36 each plus shipping halfway around the world. Belts cost $20, but my spare is sealed up in storage, and I don't expect to need it for at least a decade. I've seen the cheapest belt-drive turntable function perfectly for twenty years before requiring a belt replacement.

And whatever you do, make sure that you don't get one of those lousy USB-only tables that bypass the greatest feature of vinyl: analog audio.

In your country, with a turntable, you will suddenly have access to tens of thousands of older music titles at affordable prices. Don't be afraid to purchase used vinyl. While it might sound lousy if you take it home and just drop it on the table, a thorough cleaning with soft natural sponges and distilled water "wetted" with a few drops of Kodak Photo-flo will very often take a dirty, crackly, and skipping old record and transform it into a beautiful, bright, shiny wonder to behold.

Whether or not you will experience improved sound is up to your ears. What is maddening for audiophiles is that the majority of people apparently utterly lack the ability to detect the superiority of analog sound over CD digital. The situation is so deplorable that most of the population is perfectly satisfied with MP3 audio.

 

[KevinL]

Well first Happy Birthday ! Im happy to hear about another person discovering vinyl. Im happy to be able to help you as this is my area of expertise. I design and sell hi-end audio video systems and analog turntables and vacuum tube electronics are my passion.

First you can get into a turntable setup reasonably inexpensively, but there is a big difference in the quality of turntables, tonearms, cartridges, and phono-stages.

What you will need: Turntable,
Tonearm (which is ether integrated or separate depending on the turntable),
Phono cartridge,
and lastly a phonostage (which first amplifies the signal from the phono cartridge and then re-equalizes the signal from the record) records are recorded with low frequency's compressed because a cartridge cannot track low bass information without miss-tracking. Also if they tried and put a full bandwidth signal onto a record it would take up to much space on the record and would leave little time on each side of a record. This re-equalization is called RIAA curve.

Every part of a analog playback system makes a huge difference in the quality of sound. You can spend 100's of thousands on a turntable system and there is no limit to how much information you can retrieve from a record, but it does also depend on how good the rest of the system is.

The old saying that your system is only as good as the weakest link is very true.

So for those on a budget this is what I highly recommend:

Rega turntable: british built turntable very well done sounds amazingly good for the money. Key is these are none suspended turntables and a good stand or wall mount shelf is highly recommended so that vibrations do not transfer back to the table. This is the case with all good turntables.

Phono cartridge: luckly again you can get some very good sounding cartridges that are pretty inexpensive. Grado, Benz make some very good sounding low priced cartridges.

Phono-stage: Here is were it gets a little more difficult. Yes there are some inexpensive phonostages some not to bad, but there is a big difference in the sound quality of the better phonostages. This is at least a area you can always upgrade as you become more comfortable with analog.

turntable setup is pretty advanced and takes sometime to perfect but on a entry level turntable system you can get reasonably close. There is a book on turntable setup as this is highly recommended. There is alot of miss information on turntable setup so I strongly suggest only listening to those who are experts in the field. Michael Fremmer puts out a nice instructional video and is very respected in the hi-end audio industry.

And lastly turntable Accessories. One of the first things you will want to get is a good record cleaning machine. They will allow you to hear more information on the record and with less ticks and pops. remember if you play a dirty record you will be grinding in the dirt into the vinyl so having a clean record is essential. The VPI hw19 record cleaning machine for the money is the way to go.

You will also need a stylus force gauge to check stylus pressure as this is critical for sound and to make sure you do not damage the records by to much or to little tracking force.

And lastly I will send you some links to some or the very finest turntables and how far you can take it so you have some idea what is out there in turntables.

If you need any help or have any questions please feel free to ask.

Kevin
35 years hi-end audio video specialist, analog turntable expert