What record player?

Rega Planar 1 ECO

Assuming you don’t have a separate phone stage then this:

<br /> https://www.project-audio.com/en/product/primary-e-phono/<br /><br />

Superb turntable for the money, and less than £200 if you shop around. 

Project turntable, and choose your pricepoint.

I've got 2...

Elemental in the lounge. Comes all set up ready to go, decent cartridge, built in phono stage + USB out. Cost £180 a few years ago.

Rpm 1 in my music room/studio. Much nicer (carbon) arm and cart. Needs a separate phono stage or amp with a phono input. Cost £329 I think.

EDIT above, should have said Phono stage, not ‘phone’

I was about to start a similar thread so I hope the OP doesn’t mind me piggy-backing another question…

We’re looking for a sub £200 turntable with Bluetooth out capacity so youngest child can use existing speaker or headphones in his room. Any suggestions please?

Another vote for Project here, I've got the 'essential'.... obviously you need to buy phono, amp and speakers on top with that.

Project or Rega are the go-to choices. I think they both do one with built in phono stage now. Not sure about Bluetooth.

If you can stretch to £250 then I would recommend this:

https://www.richersounds.com/audio-technica-atlp120xusb-black-1609312822.html

It has a great cartridge (ATVM95) and stylus (eliptical) as standard but the stylus can be upgraded in the future for even better sound reproduction.

That ‘comedy’ sketch posted by redmex may be the worst I have ever seen.

That ‘comedy’ sketch posted by redmex may be the worst I have ever seen.

It's excellent 🙂

That ‘comedy’ sketch posted by redmex may be the worst I have ever seen.

It’s in STW T&Cs that it must be posted on any hi-fi thread! 🤣

Anyway - Rega, Project and Audio Technical all make good entry level turntables.

Surely the question should be what stylus..... then my answer would be ortofon concorde....

With a Technics 1210.......or 2 

Is this to use with existing vinyl, or bought from a second hand shop?

The price of new vinyl is ridiculous, especially when compared with the high quality digital downloads you can often buy more directly from the artist.

You can buy cheap gear nowadays that will give outstanding results playing back that digital music, whereas it has always been the case that you need to spend serious money on a turntable setup to get decent results, certainly results anywhere approaching that cheap digital playback system.

when you then add in the inflated prices for vinyl I just don’t understand why vinyl is becoming so popular again, it was always a flawed medium and a flawed playback system.

My girlfriend son buys vinyl at those stupid prices (3 times that of a CD, or more) and plays it back on some cheap Bluetooth linked turntable - if anything summed up the stupidity of millennial and later generations this seems to me to be a contender.

And yes, I have a decent turntable (Technics SP10 in custom corian plinth, Origin Live Encounter tonearm, Denon DL304 cartridge, Mitchell ISO HR phono stage).

Not everyone is sufficiently invested in "hi-fi" to warrant a very expensive setup. Those Project and Rega decks are perfectly serviceable and will satisfy many listeners. And yes I have a decent turntable (Linn LP12/Ittok), but play mostly CDs.

The ProJect I mentioned above comes with an Ortofon Concorde (not sure which model, but they’re not the nightclub versions I have on the 1210.) sounds pretty good and another plus for this turntable.

To the post hijacker ProJect also do Bluetooth versions of a few models, inc. the cheaper end.

My girlfriend son buys vinyl at those stupid prices (3 times that of a CD, or more) and plays it back on some cheap Bluetooth linked turntable – if anything summed up the stupidity of millennial and later generations this seems to me to be a contender

…and lots of boomers seem to forget the simple joy of music spend thousands to get the ultimate sound quality.

"The price of new vinyl is ridiculous, especially when compared with the high quality digital downloads you can often buy more directly from the artist"

I seem to remember that most records in ourprice or HMV were around £5.99 in the late 80's and early 90's. New releases were usually a quid or so more. Inflation adjusted that's less but not massively off the £25-£30 or so they cost now. Factor in that many new records are better quality vinyl than 40 years ago(though I appreciate some have been remastered with lower dynamic range which is not good) and have great artwork and I'm not sure they are that ridiculous. I have some lps that are 55 years old and play great - I have no reason to think that the lp I bought yesterday won't do the same. £30 for something that lasts that long doesn't seem outrageous.

I love the ethos of Rega turntables - build them light and rigid with as few components as possible and the shortest signal path. Whenever I read an article on Stereophile and they are reviewing some massively expensive hugely ugly monolythic turntable that weighs in at 75kg I just think no, thats just wrong.

Inflation adjusted vinyl prices are one thing but you get higher quality versions of the same product for significantly less in other mediums.

There are then several components that are much cheaper than a reasonable quality turntable that will play that music back at significantly higher quality levels of sound quality than you would get from a turntable.

The only reason to prefer new vinyl is if you want to pay exhorbitant amounts of money for a big piece of cardboard with artwork on, as if you are preferring the sound of vinyl to a high quality digital source then you have other issues with your system that the problems inherent in record playback are enhancing - like channel crosstalk making you think your system images better, or your system needing extra compression.

Whereas  you could use the money saved on the digital playback component and cheaper source material to invest in the rest of your system and fix those issues that you need a record player to mask over.

And how is the signal path on Rega turntables any shorter than any other turntable ?

and lots of boomers seem to forget the simple joy of music spend thousands to get the ultimate sound quality

Being that a vinyl LP can be three times the price of a CD or digital download you can then have 3 times as much music to listen to, and at a higher sound quality for less money than buying a basic record player, allowing you to buy even more music. And no cartridge to keep having to replace, so even more music can be bought.

I still have 4 turntables my Dual from the '80s, Ariston, Rotel and a pro ject in lime green

All still sound good but I only play vinyl once or twice a year, Donald Fagen the nightly or some early Beatles then CDs or Spotify

Sold my Systemdek it was the best of them all a couple of years ago with a Mission arm and Nagaoka mp11 boron cartridge

as if you are preferring the sound of vinyl to a high quality digital source then you have other issues with your system

I bet you're a riot at parties.

I like records, they sound nice, I like the sleeves. £30 doesn’t seem so terrible value.

There's an element of experience to things in life.  Thats vinyls appeal. Cds don't quite have it. A classic car is objectively worse and more expensive than a modern supermini but there is an experience to it. Millennials aren't the only people buying vinyl too. So chill 😎 

Being that a vinyl LP can be three times the price of a CD or digital download you can then have 3 times as much music to listen to, and at a higher sound quality for less money than buying a basic record player, allowing you to buy even more music. And no cartridge to keep having to replace, so even more music can be bought.

I don’t buy music by quantity - I buy when I like something I hear. Price doesn’t come into it.

I either buy vinyl or I stream.

lots of boomers seem to forget the simple joy of music spend thousands to get the ultimate sound quality.

Any Boomers talking about sound quality are deluding themselves. Hearing deteriorates with age and no amount of money spunked on media or hardware will buy you new ears. I'm Gen X and my former pretentious audiophile ****er days are behind me.

There’s an element of experience to things in life. Thats vinyls appeal.

Bingo.

Project or Rega are the go-to choices. I think they both do one with built in phono stage now. Not sure about Bluetooth.<br /><br />

Won’t argue with that, however;

Is this to use with existing vinyl, or bought from a second hand shop?

The price of new vinyl is ridiculous

It certainly is, and it’s also, and always has been a lossy format, by its very nature. Vinyl cannot cope with the frequency range of a digital recording, it has to be EQ’d at both ends of the frequency range at the mastering stage, the lowering of the high-frequencies accounts for the ‘warm’ sound vinyl fans rave about, and low frequencies have to be cut to avoid transients that can cause the stylus to jump from one part of a groove to the next, skipping most of a line of a song. Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ album did that on one track, and to this day, listening to a remastered digital version I still expect it to skip! That was a pressing flaw, it could be seen with a magnifying glass where the groove crossed over like points on railway tracks.

Also, it’s impossible to say what sort of condition old vinyl will be in, the petroleum crisis back in the 80’s caused lots of problems with material shortages, pressings were much thinner, would be very badly warped, causing the stylus to jump out of the groove, there were massive amounts of background noise, and unsold pressings were taken back and recycled, ground up and reused - except the paper labels in the middle weren’t punched out; they were ground up with all the rest of the vinyl so little bits of white paper were mixed into the matrix, causing even more degradation. I once had a vinyl pressing that was basically unplayable because of bits of paper actually in the grooves!

At least with modern pressings they’re 180gm virgin vinyl, not a shitty flexidisc full of rubbish. Avoid any second hand 80’s vinyl unless you can examine it, and preferably play it. <br />There were other issues where first-generation metal stampers for pressing the vinyl either wore out or were damaged, so were replaced with copies pressed from a copy tape, so already a second generation down from the first generation studio master, and cut at a mastering plant likely in a different country and by a lathe operator with who knows what experience. The way to tell is look at who mastered it and where on the sleeve, and look at the inside of the runout groove, which should have the name of the mastering plant.

If the sleeve says Mastered by Bob Ludwig at Masterdisk, and the disk has ‘Masterdisk’ stamped on, you’re golden! If it has different names but which match up, that’s good. I have proper matched copies of Dire Straits ‘Love Over Gold’, and Paul Simon’s ‘Hearts And Bones’ which are as good as when new, but they were played on a high-end properly set up deck. About £2500/worth, when new. In the late 70’s.<br />As a side note, Bob Ludwig finally retired from mastering vinyl towards the end of last year! That’s a 50-60 year career in the business, and he really was a master!

Not all of us gen x’rs have shit hearing, I’m still ok to 14.5khz - 15khz depending on time of day, first thing in the morning is best for testing. I’ve been listening to Mogwai Young Team with iems for the last hour and Atomic before that so I’d probably top out bout 13khz now.<br /><br />

Online tone generator to test your hearing, use decent iem’s or headphones 

Any Boomers talking about sound quality are deluding themselves. Hearing deteriorates with age and no amount of money spunked on media or hardware will buy you new ears.

Not that I am into classical music at all, but Radio 3 live broadcasts have always been acclaimed for sound quality and they are just going through a 14 bit digital system, so sound quality doesn't depend on those high frequencies until they are severly curtailed.

Basically if you are complaining that CDs don't give you the experience that vinyl does, you are not really into the music otherwise it wouldn't really matter. The important bit is the music and I would rather spend the money on a system that makes the music sound better and encourages me to listen to more music, rather than having more bits of cardboard to stare at.

And if you stick to digital and use a system like Roon to manage your music and playback then it gives you an even better experience than just fondling your cardboard record sleeve.

Sticking to digital also opens up the use of apps like Receiver Radio and access to streaming an awful lot of high quality music and radio stations from around the world.

Sticking to digital also opens up the possibility of using a 'room correction' system, which are increasingly becoming common. The room is one of the biggest factors in determining how your system sounds, so this can be useful.

It certainly is, and it’s also, and always has been a lossy format, by its very nature. Vinyl cannot cope with the frequency range of a digital recording, it has to be EQ’d at both ends of the frequency range at the mastering stage, the lowering of the high-frequencies accounts for the ‘warm’ sound vinyl fans rave about, and low frequencies have to be cut to avoid transients that can cause the stylus to jump from one part of a groove to the next, skipping most of a line of a song.

It's not just that though. Unless you have a linear tracking tonearm then the cartridge/stylus is actually only tracking square to the groove for a very small fraction of the records surface, so you basically have distortion for most of the record.

Then there is the problem with dirt/dust, which only expensive stylus profiles deal with well. Same with groove wear.

And then the issues with tonearm resonance/pivot quality and leading to yet more compression of the signal.

And then issues with the motor quality and accuracy, leading to more distortion becaause of speed fluctuations.

So if you are really into the music, why would you want to put up with all this BS nowadays ?

Ruddy 'ell people - the OP wants a budget turntable - not a bloody science lesson in audio quality!  🤦‍♂️ 🤦‍♂️

All those budget ones look fine. I have a budget audio technica one and it's fine. New records? yeah, expensive. Hunting out some older stuff at at record fair with my daughter? Well that's a nice morning out and can tie it into a shopping trip. Second hand shops can be ok too, but it's then down to luck.

Been pretty happy with my Audio Technica LPW140WN. Carbon tonearm, VM95e cart. Also happy with AT's support as the rubber turntable matt that was included had got folded somehow and was wobbly out of the box. AT sent me a new one and three limited edition slipmats. Nice looking deck to, if you like walnut! Probs around 250 in the UK.

Op, If you want a turntable don't listen to the nay sayers and typical audiophiles like the ones dipicted in the shop sketch which clearly still exist!. I bought a (cheap) one a few years ago after a 20 year hiatus and its brought me back to music again. Since I've got it I've really got back into buying music in all sorts of formats and built up a really nice CD system as well from secondhand and 'fun fi' components which sounds way better than it ought to for the price. Even better because my turntable was not expensive (Rega p1 Plus) it means my kids can use it and they have started buying and understanding music can be an album experience as well as a playlist. They have also started buying LPs and CDs but crucially have started to listen to the songs rather than just having them on in the background. Its really nice to see them listening to the stereo and dancing round the room or chatting to each other about musicians rather than staring at their phones.

EDIT I've clearly failed though as they don't know what an eliptical stylus is or that a hifi system has to deliver the purest sound to be any use....

Every time this comes up the dull dorks wade in and compete with each other.

Buy second hand from the 80's before CDs took over, you have to teach kids how to respect records and the stylus , proper use of the sleeve so the record doesn't slip out or even worse no protective inner sleeve as you can catch all types of scratches antibiotics won't cure your record. A scratch is like herpes , once you get one it's for life

when you then add in the inflated prices for vinyl I just don’t understand why vinyl is becoming so popular again, it was always a flawed medium and a flawed playback system.

Taylor Swift! My 12 year old wants four copies of the same album because when you put them on the wall they make a clock. Or something.

Anyway, if you want a flawed medium and playback system, there's a thread running with people defending cassettes. 😀

My latest stupidly priced - I must be bonkers - vinyl has just arrived. Will enjoy listening to such a shite music format later this evening... 🙂

You think it's mad to buy vinyl...

50% of US record buyers don't own a turntable...

https://www.nme.com/news/music/study-finds-50-per-cent-of-vinyl-buyers-in-us-dont-have-a-record-player-3437301#:~:text=Study%20finds%2050%20per%20cent,t%20have%20a%20record%20player&text=Only%2050%20per%20cent%20of,a%20new%20study%20has%20found.

Don't knock it. Its the collectors who are buying up all my old punk / hardcore records on discogs. 

My latest stupidly priced – I must be bonkers – vinyl has just arrived.

Wait - since when has "black vinyl" been a feature? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I quite like the title being represented in glyphs at the bottom though, I wonder if you can use that as a Rosetta Stone for codes written elsewhere on the sleeve? It's details like this where vinyl excels.

One additional tip for getting the best sound from a vinyl setup - hunt down 12” singles. By their nature they are about the best sound possible from a vinyl disc, they turn faster, the grooves are widely spaced, and deeper, and as a result bass is deeper. Dub recordings will  shake your foundations, providing your amp has enough current to not start clipping and melting the speakers voice coils. <br />They are likely to be in better condition too. I’ve still got a bunch from back when 12” singles started to become popular - I’ve got an original 12” of New Order ‘Blue Monday’ in the cut-out ‘floppy disc’ sleeve; the card sleeve was so expensive to produce, despite the single being the biggest selling of all time, the record label lost money on every one they sold!

hunt down 12” singles.

Absolutely.

I have some singles across multiple formats and 12" singles are noticeably better than their 7" brethren, for the reasons you state. Mixes can differ also, Roy Thomas Baker jumps to mind as someone who produced 12" singles (and albums) to be played at home but 7" were remixed to sound good on FM radio.

I’ve got an original 12” of New Order ‘Blue Monday’ in the cut-out ‘floppy disc’ sleeve;

Nice! I've only got the normal sleeve. Listened to it this morning though 🙂

the card sleeve was so expensive to produce, despite the single being the biggest selling of all time, the record label lost money on every one they sold!

As someone who works in the print trade I'd say that was in urban myth territory. Record sleeves are printed on flat card and die-cut to create the tabs which are then glued. The only difference with the floppy disc version is you need a new die-cutting forme for the shape which back then would have been about £50 tops! 🙂

the grooves are widely spaced, and deeper, and as a result bass is deeper.

I have Ed Solo's Age of Dub on 12" single and have to concur.

Wub-wub-wub

The bass is still compressed though. I understand a lot of the appeal of vinyl as I have a bedroom full and collected all through when it wasn't trendy and was much cheaper.

However, I eventually invested in the digital side of my system and there is no way I'd be buying vinyl nowadays. I'd actually like to sell a lot of it off, as then that clears a load of space from my house (and it's really bloody heavy stuff as well). But each to their own, I'm glad other people are enjoying it.

But each to their own, I’m glad other people are enjoying it.

As mentioned above with my Taylor Swift comment, my daughters are starting to see the benefits of having a decent size cover, with artwork, lyrics, credits and that. I'm not going to discourage them from buying it if it encourages them to listen to more music. Although, I'm not going to buy a turntable just for bloody Taylor Swift! 😀

I still love vinyl, but at 48 still have Technics 1210 Mk2's that i have owned since 90's and Pioneer mixer!

For me it is that the sound can be physically manipulated, that it does sound different to CD/ streaming, I do believe that analogue music (and original dance music etc was analogue) sounds better on vinyl (to me) whereas modern digital music, often was designed for streaming, so that is how it plays best.

3/4 of my vinyl is 12" singles, so there are so many mixes and remixes on there that you'd never find on CD or streaming, except ripped to youtube really.

To answer the OP though, Rega Planar 1 Plus, into Denon DM41 DAB and Q Acoustics 3030 speakers is my office set up, so can play vinyl, DAB radio, CD and bluetooth in a great small, cheapish set up that actually sounds really good.

But each to their own, I’m glad other people are enjoying it

I think this is the key factor here. I was never into vinyl; copied cassette tapes were about all I could get when I was a kid, but I did like the 'experience' of handling a record cover, with the artwork and lyrics etc. Some were works of art in their own right; whilst CDs simply shrunk many iconic covers down, the works of people like Storm Thorgerson, Peter Saville and Derek Riggs could never be enjoyed in quite the same way again. The visual aesthetic became synonymous with the music, and part of popular culture in its own right. I remember people having such classic covers like Warhol's banana, Paul Cannell's design for Screamadelica, and Kraftwerk's Calvert and Kinnear inspired Autobahn as framed artworks on their walls. The 12" record sleeve was a big part of our lives, whether we actually listened to the music or not. So that whole sensory experience, the artworks, the lyrics, the occasional inner sleeve easter eggs, even the smell of new vinyl, that made enjoying music that bit more magical. So I really do get the whole vinyl revival thing, in the same way that it's lovely to see younger people embracing film photography again. 

As for the actual audio quality though, well, only a fool would try to claim that vinyl is better than digital audio for actual fidelity. As has been mentioned already, if audio fidelity is your thing, then modern digital recording is unquestionably superior. But you might prefer the 'warm' sound of vinyl; the compression of dynamic range creates this, and people grew up with it, so it might well colour their subjective experience, and be a 'reference' for enjoyment. That's also fine. And in the early days of CDs, many were simply mastered from non-original sources, so sub-optimal for digital reproduction. Digital 'remastering' (creating whole new master sources from original analogue studio tapes) became a thing, and many classic albums were greatly improved. But many genres of music didn't get the full digital remastering treatment, and many older original sources were lost, meaning there's an awful lot of music out there which now only exists on vinyl. Take early Ska, Reggae and Rocksteady for example; a lot of recordings were made using pretty cheap, often home made equipment, so were never the best to begin with. And most tracks were distributed on 7" singles, so suffered greater compression and lower sound quality from the beginning. There is no digital master for such works, and never will be. Which is very sad. So for now, we have to embrace vinyl to continue enjoying such music. <br /><br /><br />

Somewhat tempted by this vinyl lark now.

I had a linear tracking Technics deck + ortofon MM cartridge in the 80s/90s. Then a fancier turntable in the early 90s.

I sold off all the vinyl I could and gave the rest to charity shops in the late 90s. Same with my CDs.

Now considering a turntable again.

Hearing my SO play some very old records on one of the children’s Denon turntables o thought it sounded good.

I’m expecting to have more time on my hands over the next few years so faffing about with sleeves and queuing up styli should fit right in.

What turntable for optimum VFM?

Edit. Amp and speakers will be Yamaha RX-V379 + KEF reference model 2 or Denon AVC-X3700H + monitor audio gold 60s