Are Dual turntables any good?

If you want a belt-drive or idler wheel TT, with modern amenities like non-intrusive auto shutoff and/or quartz lock regulation, Duals are as good as they get. By the time the CS-506 and CS-5000 were being produced, Japan had gone whole hog into DD.

The older ones from the 70's (with the typical start-stop lever) had unreliable Auto start and Stop mechanisms, so make sure that is working. I've had three of them over the years, and while they look and feel a bit clunky compared to the Japanese, the sound was IMO better than the Japanese DD.

On the other hand, for a cheap basement system the Japanese TT's are much easier to find, set up, and use.

The 5000 is nice to look at but has a lot of plastic parts on the tonearm assembly and is hard to get the feet adjusted. It seems to work fine but I have never used it in my main system. It is known for being in the movie the Lair of The White Worm.

Not sure if anyone reading is actually interested in these minutiae but, I still have a CS-5000 too, and yeah, and when I first got it those crazy feet took a while to figure out! Not user friendly until you get the concept, but they make sense from a design standpoint, in a German kind of way. I still don't know what the red slider things do....

The only plastic is in the headshell assembly (not the tonearm) to keep weight down, since it incorporates a Vertical Tracking Angle adjuster, which would be too heavy even in aluminum. I considered removing the adjuster and just using the barebones headshell, but I think the inherent value of good VTA far exceeds whatever would be accomplished by removing excess plastic.

The other plastic part I was referring to is the cover at the base of the tonearm which appears to be aluminum but is actually plastic.

Just bought a 1257 with QLM 32 MK111 cartridge. Any comments? I remember my audiophile cousin had a Dual when I was a kid and I marveled at it. So simple yet it really had a pristine, sweet sound. Then he was drafted, but he sent $ home to have his family purchase LPs.
I purchased the 1257 to play the beat up Lps I pick up at Goodwill. (Just got 4 old Cal Tjader LPs in horrible shape, but the covers are too cool). It sounds pretty good. Any info/comments about this table and cart would be appreciated.