Turntable selection advise

Getting into playing records requires expense beyond the table, cartridge and phono preamplifier. One also needs record cleaning supplies, a stand or shelf, isolation, interconnects, set-up tools...and records.

It's not a small investment...even on a budget.

My advice would be to shelve the idea until your finances situation improves.

you might want to check out audioasylum. They have a lot more vintage table strings than you will find here. There is a lot of folks on that forum that get a lot of enjoyment from the older and cheaper tables and a lot of fans for the moderate priced vintage MM cartridges. I suspect you will get a much different range of responses. I like the high end tables and get a lot of enjoyment our of my investment so I am not talking down the higher quality tables but I also know a lot of folks who get similar enjoyment out of a lot less investment. As specifically to your question, the technics tables are typically better built than the AT table you mentioned IMO I would also consider a vintage denon, pioneer, yamaha, etc.

Unless you already have a substantial vinyl collection, it may be a bad idea to start from scratch.

Ever see the movie, "The Money Pit"?

There's a real life analog version and you can find many testimonials in the threads.

Good luck.

bill is right. its amazing how many stereotypes jump into a turntable and all the trappings of record collecting, without having a record collection. before jumping in, just know vinyl is expensive, imperfect, and interactive in a variety of ways.

I will add to the Technics SL-12XX series. For the money they are no brainers. Look you will find most who have had these with an open mind will state they are knockouts to anything you can remotely get in their price point. Add some KAB USA mods and you get a real champ.

I fell into the direct drive being bad cr@p when I got back into vinyl in 2002 and let m tell you the arguments against good direct drive is cr@p. The drive system on the SL-12xx series is excellent and dead silent. I have a KAB USA distributed SL-1200mkII with the Cardas arm rewire and it's a beauty with my Denon DL-110 H.O. moving coil cartridge. I will add the fluid arm damper down the road.