Inside A £30 Record Player

I'm a pretty casual vinyl listener (mostly got into it since I like having a physical representation of the music I love, and to reclaim some sense of ownership in a world defined by Spotify and Apple Music). I enjoyed this post, and more or less agree with the author's opinion that claims of superior vinyl audio quality are bunk - and particularly meaningless in a world where most new music is recorded or produced digitally in the first place.

That said, I probably still would avoid a cheapo player like this that does not have an adjustable tone arm. For one, it's more likely to have issues skipping when you can't adjust it properly. The second concern - which I'll admit I have no data to back up, and since this is an opinion from the audiophile community, may warrant some skepticism - is that cheap players with unbalanced tone arms are infamous for supposedly wearing down records more quickly over time by applying too much pressure.

The author's note about the stereo output being unbalanced, by the way, is a relatively common side effect of an unbalanced tone arm (though there's various other reasons it can occur).

Don't buy a new record player. I just bought a used Technics SL2000 for ~120€. Maybe you've heard of the Technics 1200, which is quite famous. The 2000 is a cheaper model in that series. It's from the late 70's, but unlike me it still works perfectly.

120€ is triple the cost of what OP paid, but you get a TT that's actually more than a gimmick. And you also get a far better product than what you could buy new at the same price.

There's a lot of audiophile insanity in this field, and trying to find actual concrete information about pickups and turntables is made difficult by the amount of nonsense you have to wade through. But I think the appeal of records and turntables, is something similar to retro computing. It's slow and impractical, and it can be expensive, but the act of putting on a record and listening to a whole album, is just a different experience that streaming cannot replicate.

Just don't go full hipster about it.

Vinyl is not "better". It just sounds different than digital playback. Some people like the characteristic of the sound output of vinyl better. It can be mostly described at "warmer" or "has more colour". Others really enjoy the physical nature of a record. I have both a large collection of ripped CDs to lossless format and vinyl records. I can tell the difference between the same album played on each medium. In both cases the music is being played to the same set of speakers via the same tube amp. Is one better than the other? That is down to what you like! Would say for most rock/pop/metal it does not matter. For classical/jazz/opera I prefer the sound of the vinyl.

One issue that others have pointed out is that how you master counts for a ton of how the music sounds. Unfortunely you can mess with the music more on the digital medium (there was for a long time a race to loudness and compression) which made things sound just freaking bad on mid-range setup. It was okay in headphones, but on any decent system it would sound like crap. The last few Metallica albums were like this.

At the end if you do like to listen to vinyl do NOT use a cheap player like this. Playing is physical motion and the tracking weight of the tone arm being high will destroy your vinyl.

There are tons of audiophile sites out there and some (most?) of the information you need to apply a reality filter to, but some of the reviews are pretty good. If you are looking for a good mid-range starter record player I recommend you look at the stuff from Rega. You can get a good very simple player for <$500 (I did not say cheap).

IC2 is not populated but the pinout looks like an I2C EEPROM, so it could be used for storing settings. The pinout of the main IC doesn't match a PCM2902E, and in any case that doesn't have an EEPROM function.

The ratio between the motor and turntable is likely 34:1, as that gives some reasonable speeds...

    1130 / 34 = 33.24
    1520 / 34 = 44.71
    2360 / 34 = 69.41

...except for the last one which is presumably for 78 but quite a bit below.

The author's bashing of "original" 1960s turntables is, of course, unwarranted. A lot of those turntables were, and still are, quite good.

You can definetly hear it is pitched up.

I bought a cheap record player to play with, and put a decent cartridge in it. The main problem was it turned too slowly. Drilling a hole in the bottom exposed the potentiometer that controlled the speed.

The problem was determining its speed.

I finally figured out a no-buck solution. I wanted to tune it to 33 1/3 rpm. So I taped a piece of paper to the turntable that would thwack against the tonearm pivot on each revolution, then counted the thwacks in a minute, and adjusted for 33 and a bit. Worked fine!

P.S. attempting to count the revolutions by watching it spin is an exercise in madness.

The pot is probably for adjusting the motor speed. This is VR151 on the circuit board.

I don't get the reasoning that because the cheapest possible vinyl player sounds horrible, all vinyl players sound horrible. It really goes the other way: vinyl record is a medium that depends on fine mechanics and amplification for very low signal levels to work, so it just takes a bit of money to build a decent record player and preamp. Because of the vinyl boom of last 10 years or so, the current record players may be better and more affordable than ever, but this one is just sub par.

If price is no object you an always get a ELP LT-1LRC that uses a laser to read the vinyl disk.

The tone of this article is incredibly obnoxious. This would be slightly (but only slightly) easier to swallow if I wasn't nursing doubts throughout about the author's knowledgeability. For example:

> Early Beatles music was specifically mastered to sound good on crackly AM radios and craptacular Dansette record players.

I have news for you: vast swathes of popular music are specifically mastered to sound good on low end equipment. That's as true today as it was in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and noughties.

As an example, Michael Jackson's Thriller, along with plenty of other albums in the late 70s and 80s, was mastered using Auratone 5C Super Sound Cubes. These sound absolutely awful, but they give you useful information about what your mix is going to sound like on low-end equipment. A modern equivalent would be something like the Avantone MixCube, which I highly rate even though it also sounds horrendous.

If your music only sounds good on audiophile level equipment, that's obviously fine, but you have to be realistic about how that's going to limit your potential market.

Similarly, the digs at vintage turntables also smack of ignorance. Again, most "hi-fi" equipment throughout the decades has sat at the low end of the quality spectrum because that's where the biggest market is. Most people are perfectly happy with sound systems that have passable playback quality, which is absolutely fine. However, certainly since the late 1960s, it's been possible to buy higher end equipment if you crave better sound quality.

And, on that note, as others have done I would also highly recommend picking up used hi-fi equipment rather than new. There are some real bargains to be had and it's relatively straightforward to build a great sounding system without breaking the bank. It's also quite fun and rewarding.

(Finally, on sound quality, whilst CD is objectively better than vinyl, and has for example significantly higher dynamic range, it is quite possible for a vinyl recording to sound better than a CD. An example of where this might be the case is for albums that were remastered for CD during the loudness war era, which can introduce serious clipping issues[0] and significantly reduce the dynamic range of the CD master relative to the vinyl original. In this kind of situation - and, of course, it does depend on having at least half decent gear - it's entirely possible for the vinyl version to sound better than the CD remaster, even though CD as a format is capable of noticeably higher quality and greater dynamic range than vinyl.)

[0] This often results in harsh sounding recordings that are quite tiring to listen to, particularly at higher volumes. If you have the option of patching a graphic equalizer into your signal path you can use it to somewhat take the edge off recordings like this, although it's obviously not ideal. I generally prefer listening with EQ bypassed but sometimes I find I have to use it. You can also use EQ to compensate for a less than ideal listening environment.