Turn Turn Turntable Thread

What's yer table? how'z it turning? happy?

My name is Scott and i'm very happy with my Rega P1 cuz it's simple like me!

i just bought a cheap turntable from this dude and it's an old Philips 212. Sounds great! so, i think that will be my home turntable. and my rega will stay in the store.

just played a pristine dgg pressing of boston symphony orchestra doing three places in new england by ives on the philips and it sounded PHAT.

okay, mint copy of heavy vinyl impulse coltrane stellar regions is mindboggling. this turntable is really making my tiny speakers sound like champs! maybe i always needed a preamp and i nver knew it. i'm kinda dumb that way.

rega p2. doin' the job in good style

I heart my Music Hall MMF-5 but I have to buy a new Goldring needle for it and they start at $175!!! Man am I broke.

I bought a Project Xpression III on audiogon.com for a good price a few months ago. It was brand new with a Audio-Technica 440MLa on it, but I replaced it with a Benz Micro MC20E2. Sounds nice.

Michell Gyro SE with Rega RB300 tonearm (van den Hul/Cardas rewire) and Ortofon MC25FL cart into an NVA Phono 1 MC pre-amp. Put together between 1996 and 1999 and, sadly, mostly a dust collector these days (and it's very good at that, being an open design). Did play the heavyweight vinyl version of Supreme Balloon by Matmos the other day and it sounded glorious and 3D.

technics sl-1200 at home (solid, no complaints except every six months it gets "sick" and has some speed-wobbles)
numark pt-01 at work (much more speed-wobbly, which may be because i use it for like 40hr/week)

technics is only sick for like a day at a time; sometimes the numark needs a few days off. luckily, @nnie has been nice enough to let me keep her numark in my office as a backup. we dont have a bedroom turntable this way, but whatever, we only have a small 1BR anyway...

http://www.insound.com/images_promo/Keepsake_TurntableBLK.jpg

i have a linn LP 12, no upgrades or anything. it sounds good. but i miss 45s.

whoa only 33??? thats wack!

the numark is cool cause it does 78's, although im sure it gets super-plaguey switching to 78 a lot...

very wack indeed. i used to use a H/K Rabco ST-7 but the linear tracking is such a pain in the ass. apparently you can upgrade the motor on the LP12s to do 45, but that is money that will inevitably be spent on records. 78s would be amazing.

I still have the Sony PS 454 I bought in 1983...haven't used it in probably 10 years. I should just sell it, if there's a market for it.

technics SL-3200, no complaints. it's not 1200-esque or anything, but it'll do until i can afford something classier.

for about 15 years I had a super solid late 70s pioneer pl-540 i'd picked up at a baltimore salvation army for $29. about two years ago it started intermittently slowing down, as if a ghost laid his hand on the record for a few seconds. my wife bought me a pro-ject debut iii with the speed box about a year ago for a birthday and it's been just great, but getting used to no auto-return is old dog no new tricks, please.

the turntable in my room is from like, uh, 1980 or so, was my parents. iirc it's a toshiba something or other. it doesn't track very well, or maybe the arm is just super sensitive, but it'll skip over even large pieces of dust, or a stray cat hair. which is kind of irritating. i'd like to upgrade at some point when i have the cash. in the living room i have a pt01, which i use a lot. it plays 78s! and i have a special 78 needle for it too. i don't know how high quality the needle it comes with is, but i haven't noticed it damaging my records or anything.

so, i bought two turntables off of this dude at the store. a sweet old phillips and a cheapo japanese table. the phillips worked like a dream, but then it died, but now i think it just needs a new belt. so, i've been using the cheapo table and it's fine for the store. so, i took my rega home tonight and hooked it up to this old monster marantz receiver that maria found at the dump. sounds cool, but the marantz is way too powerful for my small speakers. sooooo, i think i'm gonna switch receivers and bring my old (new-ish) one home and hook the marantz up to those behemoth 120 watt speakers that maria got from her grandmother. i think they'll work well together. i was actually thinking of finding some sort of speaker preamp to boost the power of the monsters. just to see how loud they can really be! but the marantz is probably powerful enough for the speakers.

fascinating, huh?

i'm just happy to be able to play records at home again.

i love that the marantz has a mono/stereo button.

you seem to have quite a knack for finding records and related equipment in the garbage. what is your secret? an army of street urchins?

"always looking...always digging."

that's my motto.

that and "more pie, please."

999

anybody have a project turntable? i think the one in our house (it's my girlfriend's) is a debut II.

see, i just replaced the stylus - an Ortofon 5E, which just slides off and on, so there's not really any room for anything to go wrong - but now I've noticed that the bottom part of the cartridge is making contact with the vinyl on certain records.

is this because of the weighting??

I've tried adjusting the weight on the arm, but it doesn't seem to want to move. and the weighting shouldn't really have changed anyway. unless it was dragging before too. I think the old stylus got binned, so I can't really test it.

the records it's happening on aren't particularly warped or anything. i think it's maybe the depth of the grooves. or is that completely absurd? how much does groove depth vary??

does it have a height/angle adjustment thing on it like a 1200? could it be that?

my amateur opinion:

i think variations in groove depth are bound to be a mm or less. like the poster above said, see if you can adjust the vertical tracking angle by raising the arm height (or lowering it, if the front end of the cartidge is hitting). no idea whether the project 2 has an arm height adjustment or not, tho. i'm also assuming that the azimuth (left/right angle if you're looking at the cartridge head on) is adjusted so that it's not just one side of the cartridge that is dragging.

definitely re-check the counterweight balance - adjust it so the arm just floats near the surface of the record, zero the counterweight, and add 1.5-2 g of tracking force.

if there is no arm height adjustment, you could also adjust the VTA by putting a little shim in the front between the top of the cartridge and the headshell so that the bottom of the cartridge is level w/r/t to the record surface.

it does seem to be one side of the cartridge that's making contact, so the alignment could well be askew. i'll check it out later. it's also missing this little weight that hangs on a string at the back of the tone arm, but i'm not even sure what that's supposed to be doing.

Thanks for the tips!

tbh, I'm tired of this turntable anyway. lifting the platter and manually changing the belt to vary the speed seems like no way to behave in the year 2009.

also, azimuth!

it's also missing this little weight that hangs on a string at the back of the tone arm, but i'm not even sure what that's supposed to be doing.

you need this, it is the counterweight for your tonearm.

"tbh, I'm tired of this turntable anyway. lifting the platter and manually changing the belt to vary the speed seems like no way to behave in the year 2009."

You can get a Project Speed Box II for it, I have one for my Xpression III.

"see, i just replaced the stylus - an Ortofon 5E, which just slides off and on, so there's not really any room for anything to go wrong"

except something can go wrong. you can totally smoosh the cheap plastic around the needle taking one off or putting one on if you aren't careful.

how exactly do speed boxes work?

It changes the frequency or electrical current coming to the motor which somehow changes the speed.

xpost
ok... i mean, i was pretty gentle with it, as i'd never taken one off before, but it did seem to slip on and off without much resistance. perhaps as if I was pulling the paper strip from a half-broken fortune cookie, trying not to do any further damage

i use an ortofon needle - the same one that comes with my rega - and i just remember taking an old one off - gently - and the plastic got bent on one side. it was old and i wasn't going to use it again, but it just seemed like i barely had to do anything to damage it. i suppose you would notice pretty quick if the one on your turntable was bent in any way or misshapen.

I think this counts as a turntable. I still have the turntables I'd mentioned earlier up-thread, but recently bought this Seeburg as a project to see if I can get it back to working order.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4133/5056725297_121519fd02.jpg

It was essentially dead when I got it (and had mud-dauber nests throughout the machine) but have slowly been fixing up the electronic side of the house. Once I get that somewhat set, I'm going to have to disassemble and clean the mechanism and likely fix some worn out parts. Ultimately I'm going to convert it play both large and small hole 7"s at 45rpm. It won't end up in the house but likely in a friend's bar or will sell to someone. Fun nonetheless.

that's so cool

hey, so i sell two kinds of crosley things in the store. you know, the cheapo retro things. one is the crosley tech turntable with built in speakers and a radio. and you can plug it into a receiver if you feel like it. the other is one of those usb retro suitcase deals. and they are good for casual use by people who have a couple of old boxes of records and want to buy records occasionally. but what about just a beginner/entry-level table for 150 or less? what should i sell? denon? technics? just want one thing for people a LITTLE more serious about records, but something cheap enough to sell. and i guess it should be usb too? but it doesn't have to be.

imo this one is a little janky, but certainly affordable and FINE

I'll be watching this thread - I need to get a new turntable.

god i wish pro-ject would put out a $150 table in different colors. i could sell something like that for sure. people who didn't even know they wanted a turntable would buy one.

http://www.needledoctor.com/core/media/media.nl?id=10412&c=ACCT106601&h=1b4dca00927fab731bd8

what kind of a turntable do you need, michael? what's your price range?

i always tell people to go rega, cuz i love mine so much. and they have a range of prices. can't really go wrong with any of them. but they aren't CHEAP cheap or anything.

http://www.needledoctor.com/Online-Store/Rega-Turntables

i wish the numarks didn't look like some plastic hunk a junk. but the price is certainly right.

michael is pretty swank so he might need this one. only $150,000!

http://www.needledoctor.com/core/media/media.nl?id=19139&c=ACCT106601&h=fdd60514722ddcd6e11b

The old turntable isn't grounded or something and makes a buzzing sound and I'd like to get a new one with USB capablity to record some of the gf's old vinyl. 69's suggestion looks good but in a house with insane felines, I really think it behoves me to get a dust cover. I'm not looking for anything super expensive - it's just for home listening.

Can't see the image. Link?

these are cheap. hundred bucks.

http://www.amazon.com/PLTTB3U-Direct-Turntable-Internal-Outputs/dp/B00476N8DY

hell, that's what i should get for the store! thanks, me!

Cool, thanks Scott!

Has anyone seen one of these linear tracking turntables like the Technics sl-5 in action? I'm tempted but also a bit scared to buy one for cheap on craigslist. I'm afraid that the 'automatic' queuing of tracks may become irritating after a few weeks.

Advance to 1:00 in this video, it shows how it works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWVGsHuDeK4

I had a Sharp linear-tracking turntable for awhile, one that had a slide-out drawer so you could stack things above it. It originally had two cartridges, one above & one below, so it could play both sides of a record by itself. But by the time I got it only the top side worked and unreliably at that, so I ditched it. It was kind of like this one, shown here with its case removed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bS2RarB0_A

Oops, not that one, but that is a way-cool turntable! WANT!

Here's the one I had:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51FDQWS_pkg

Thanks, those are very cool! I am worried about the reliability, though. It would be my main turntable since I'm trashing the old Denon I've been using. I don't see any turntables currently in production using linear tracking, so I wonder if there is a fundamental problem.

I don't know how reliable they are compared to conventional pivoting tonearms, but the supposed benefit of linear tracking was that the needle would always be at a perfect 90 degree tangent which theoretically would yield better sound quality, since records are cut using linear tracking. But in practice, there wasn't really any audible difference, and the only real advantage (in some situations) was their smaller size and for some of them, the slide-out drawers or front-load flaps and two-sided playback capability.

I had a B&O linear tracking turntable. I'd thought it might cure the problem of pitch variance in records pressed slightly off-center, thinking that the linear arm might slide back and forth to compensate. But it didn't work that way; it still pivoted at one point. Made the problem worse, in fact, because of the shorter arm swinging through a greater angle. Worked fine on normal records, though.

I sold my Gyro SE/RB300/MC25FL last week - to a nice chap from Welling for whom it was his first new turntable in 40 years. And he still had that one (a Garrard 401, an 18th b'day present).

Currently using Planar 2/RB250/Bias 2 into my Cyrus Two's MM stage. It's not bad. Not sure how old the cartridge is. Bit ragged in the upper mids and sibilant on voices but everything else sounds pretty good.

recommendations on a nice three speed turntable?
my portable i was using for 78s kicked the bucket, and the one i am borrowing temporarily takes ~forever~ to get up to speed.
figure it's time to buy something that will last.

Bit late to the 4 month old post, I borrowed a Technics SL-5 for a while in the late 90s, but gave it back because it sounded awful. Around the same time I had one of these though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2kFPFnhu2Y

It sounded very good indeed, but broke after a couple of years and couldn't find anyone to fix it, so went for a Technics 1200, which has worked flawlessly since then - would recommend going for a 1200 to all but the most dedicated audiophiles.

But I would love one of these with the jog wheel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnKFcdO2wlQ

get this when you are rich:

http://www.rega.co.uk/html/planar78.htm

I wonder how niche that niche is.

I ended up buying a 1600mkII

Got a project debut carbon at the weekend. It looks and sounds amazing, not that I have much experience with turntables that aren't made of plastic.

kinda gushy at how good it sounds tbh.

Burn in is mostly bollocks tho, right?

i just bought a cheap turntable from this dude and it's an old Philips 212. Sounds great!

Just checked this thread because I think I want to get a better turntable than my old Ariston ATT420 sometime soon, and remembered my dad's old Philips 212 which I inherited in my teens. God, I loved that thing. Can't remember why I replaced it, and am now hankering to find another one.