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).
Even a lot of relatively cheap record players have adjutable tonearm weights. But it's not just the vertical needle force that wears out the records. The other issue is lack of adjustable (or any) anti-skate force. This keeps the needle from being forced to one side of the groove.
I stumbled across the article recently where someone set up an A/B test to try to observe record damage from these cheap turntables. While there are some limitations of the experiment, I thought it was a good idea. There are too many "facts" that are just accepted as true without any emperical observation (not just in the audio community).
> 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.
Exactly, at least for me as well. Perhaps older music, mastered in analog and later put out for radio airplay (or converted to digital) by slamming all of the levels as high as they'd go, sounds better on vinyl insofar as vinyl is as close to "original" as you're going to get. The "loudness war" is a thing, for sure.
But for me, it's a hobby, and hobbies need not be completely efficient. I like fiddling with my mid-range record player, digging for albums I like, finding the one copy of a Broadway soundtrack of a wildly popular band's album that got made once and wasn't very popular[0], and just watching the record go round while I listen with decent headphones.
And, especially, reading articles like this that take a lighthearted view of taking apart a piece of kit.
- Vinyl is higher fidelity (yourself, and the article).
- Vinyl sounds better.
Vinyl colors sound, in the same way that some Vacuum Tubes color sound, which is a roundabout way of saying: They objectively make it less similar to the reference material than straight digital. But even though Vinyl is objectively worse at reproduction, some people prefer it (i.e. it subjectively sounds better to them).
Why might that be? And that question itself is when you go down a rabbit hole (e.g. Does playing a Vinyl album twice ever sound identical? And is this imperfection more pleasurable to some people than a perfect one? Etc). I don't own any Vinyl nor am I a big Vinyl aficionado, but there's undeniably a colorization when listening to a song in Vinyl Vs. digital, and then we get into the subjective realm of if this is "better" or "worse."
PS - This is true all across the audio reproduction realm. For example horn Vs. reference-style speakers, horns also heavily colorize and are quite popular (particularly for Home Theater), but are also divisive because it is objectively "worse" (but subjectively "better" for some).
One other reason why vinyl sounds better is that how it’s mastered. For streaming, tracks are optimized for low quality headphones and phone speakers. Loudness is all that is required.
Mastering for vinyl, however, takes effort. Do it wrong and the record becomes unplayable. So when you have to put in the effort anyway, might as well make it sound good at the same time.
A/B some tracks some time. Chances are the vinyl version sounds more polished with a bit more dynamics instead of having everything slam into a limiter. This has nothing to do with sound coloring or “warmth”.
Yeah, the Loudness War is why (new pressings from) old 1970s and 1980s masters sound better to many people. (Me included.)
To add to the differences, technological limitations of vinyl (inability to handle heavy bass) possibly affected the music that was made and published. Maybe it had to be more melodic, or something.
I mean, compared to the majority of streaming platforms (YouTube, Spotify), sure. But there's the entire world of lossless music that just outperforms vinyls in every way.
But yeah, in both cases, you'd need to shell out at least a couple of hundred euros on speakers to fully experience either vinyls or lossless, and that has proven to be not important to the vast majority of the people.
I have a pretty large collection of lossless files, a record player, some vinyls, and speakers that allow me to tell the difference, but I still play Spotify on them like 95% of the time.
Don’t forget the converters. A lot of people get crazy headphones and connect them to their laptop headphone jack or a cheap Focusrite interface where poor design and pcb layout mean you can literally hear the power section.
Lots of CDs and lossless digital is mastered like shit, for whatever reason. My fav to hate is Depeche Modes “Playing the Angel”. I was given it at release and couldn’t at first understand why my (very humble, late 80s) set played it so bad. Well, it’s clipped to hell.
Some vinyl releases seem to be just copy paste of a shitty digital master, but most vinyl is mastered well. This HAS to be a big reason many prefer vinyl.
Older vinyl also often has less range, but no clipping, which can make them soothing to listen to. I suppose automatic gain adjustment in Spotify gives the same result, so there’s that.
But the thing with vinyl for me are the physical things and the ritual. It’s sheer joy. I don’t have many records, maybe 30, but it’s a fun thing.
> There's two different arguments being conflated:
> - Vinyl is higher fidelity (yourself, and the article).
> - Vinyl sounds better.
> Vinyl colors sound, in the same way that some Vacuum Tubes color sound, which is a roundabout way of saying: They objectively make it less similar to the reference material than straight digital. But even though Vinyl is objectively worse at reproduction, some people prefer it (i.e. it subjectively sounds better to them).
> Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war."
Vinyl recording technology has technical limitations that make it far less suited to dynamic range compression (IIRC, something with groove spacing). I've read there have been some recent dual vinyl/digital releases where the vinyl version sounds objectively better because it was mastered for its medium and the digital version sounds shitty because it was mastered for loudness.
I believe a huge part of it is the actual hardware of the turntable, right? People attribute a lot of the character to the medium itself, but it is of course possible to have an extremely “clean” master on vinyl. If the characteristics of the vinyl itself are changed by playing, or if the vinyl changes between plays, then yes, you would likely be providing different input to the read/amp system than before.
As a newbie to vinyl, I had no idea about tone arms. Part of my intention with this was to replace all the guts with a Raspberry Pi and control things like the arm digitally.
As for the wear on the vinyl - there are quite a few original pressings of Sgt Pepper. I don't mind scratching this one to hell and back!
That's so interesting. I was thinking about comparing the length of tracks with the CD. Or using OpenCV to count the RPM. I had no idea people could hear subtle pitch changes like that.
Vocal made it more immediately obvious, but both was fairly noticeable to me (though I'm not sure how much I would have noticed the first one if it wasn't such a well known piece).
Oh, one can clearly hear that is off-pitch. It's not some skill or talent that people are born though, it definitely can be trained.
I was going to recommend you to look into the Philips Golden Ears Challenge, but it seems that they shamefully took it down. It was this website that went at lengths to show you different aspects of sound reproduction and you could make a ton of different A/B tests for things like coloring, compression artifacts, sound stage and tonality.
When I finished it, I worried for a while this was going to ruin music for me and that I would become some kind of audiophile snob. Turns out the opposite happened. The ear training was very helpful to learn to separate the "good enough" from the "great" and the "great" from the "good-but-overpriced-audiophile-bait". I could get the $1000+ gear from a colleague who loved to spend money on audio stuff, give him an honest assessment about it and still go back contently to my $70 headphones, playing on my DIY amp and sourced from a $5 USB board...
Thanks. I'm new to electronic circuits. Could I replace the pot with something digitally controlled? My eventual plan is to replace the main board with an SBC.
I pick this one because it has a good guide to go with it... but this digital pot is a different value. It's 10K ohms, and the one on the board is 2K ohms. Even so, it might work (it depends on the circuit). You need to remove the pot, and connect the RL, RW, and RH pins from the board to the pot pins.
I’m having a hard time imagining a reason that pot would need to be digitally controlled. It would be set at the factory and isn’t meant to be adjusted during use. It looks like its role is to be tuned to account for resistor tolerance in the motor’s circuit—-otherwise each board would have a slightly different current going to the motor, and different speed.
If the goal is to switch between 33 and 45 digitally, then I figure you’re better off finding that switch on the circuit board and replacing it with a relay or something.
High quality turntables have a speed control and dots with strobes on the side of the platter for you to get the speed exactly right. So a non adjustable resister here is a sign of lower quality. Making it digital would be great to get the pitch exactly right.
This one is adjustable, just not very easily (it's still accessible through the hole in the bottom of the case) --- perhaps because they don't plan on it needing much adjustment other than the initial factory setting.
The digital pot the other person posted uses 7 bits for 0-10k ohms, so it’s much less precise than a real trim pot. For most arduino type applications that’s probably fine, but if the goal is to get super anal about nailing 33 1/3 rpm exactly, and keeping it in tune over slight environmental changes, then it really isn’t good enough.
I guess it would be fun to come up with some kind of feedback scheme that trims the digital pot automatically. But as a practical thing rather than a for the heck of it project it really doesn’t seem to be worth the effort over just using a pot.
I feel like most hobby projects of mine end like this: bring home a bag of stuff from fry’s, realize while futzing with the breadboard that it’s a much simpler problem than I first thought, wind up with a bag of unused stuff from fry’s because I don’t want to drive back to Burbank to return it.
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.
That's not the reasoning. He mentions at least one thing: Vinyl records sping with the same speed for the whole record, so the audio quality gets worse toward the end. This is not the case with digital recordings.
- Because of the pivoting nature of the playback tonearm, you get a minimum of 2.5 degrees tracking error on the inner grooves as well. This causes some distortion.
- The very best playback cartridges have intrinsic total harmonic distortion figures up around 0.5%, which is second-worst in the audio chain, only exceeded by speakers (typically 1%-3% for good quality speakers).
Mechanically induced distortion is mainly second harmonic, though, and is less grating than odd-harmonic distortion, as you get with electrical clipping and DAC artefacts.
Yes, those things are true. They do set limits on accurately vinyl record player can reproduce the original signal, but they certainly do not mean that all record players are as bad as this one.
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.
but Technics's patents expired a few years ago (2008?) so there are a lot of knockoffs now.
Nearly all TTs are made in one factory on the east coast of China. IIRC the company is called something like Han Pin. (I have a Reloop. I love the auto braking.)
I'd say get a good quality TT aimed at DJs, rather than some "audiophile" TT with a platter "handcrafted by Tibetan monks from organic yak leather", and all the rest.
I inherited many 78 rpm records from my great-grandparents by way of my deceased grandparents and deceased parents.
They are from the 1920s-1940s. I've spent countless hours trying to find the right turntable to buy and then the right cartridge (people say the groove widths were different in the 1920s or 30s so i need special stylus with those records but not the ones from the 40s...maybe?). It's maddening... i just want to listen to what my great-grandparents listened to without damaging the media... but it seems to take weeks of research because there are thousands of opinions.
p.s. i never met my great-grandparents and thought this would be a cool way to get to know them.
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...
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.
According to legend, some songs in the 80's were engineered to sound as if they were played on AM radio, not so much to sound acceptable on that medium, even if they were being played on superior systems. The reason was, some of the people with influence over the process believed that a hit sounded that way. Which, because the hits tended to be a mainstay of AM radio, there was a correlation.
Owning old vinyl to play on well made second hand gear is far more sustainable than streaming music which has a poor EULA or storing terabytes of audio where you only listen to roughly 1%. You can argue the same with CD’s but disc rot is an increasing issue.
> You can argue the same with CD’s but disc rot is an increasing issue.
Yeah, I live in fear of this: have hundreds of CDs, plus games for various systems on CD, DVD-ROM and Blu-Ray. All of them will gradually become unreadable although, so far, I've been fortunate.
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).
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.
Lots of turntables in the 80's had flickering lights lighting a pattern of dots on the edge of the turntable. The pattern would stand still if the turntable was revolving at the right speed. My Technics had a pattern for 33 1/3 and for 45. Is this something you could try?
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThat 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).
I stumbled across the article recently where someone set up an A/B test to try to observe record damage from these cheap turntables. While there are some limitations of the experiment, I thought it was a good idea. There are too many "facts" that are just accepted as true without any emperical observation (not just in the audio community).
https://www.audioappraisal.com/will-a-cheap-turntable-damage...
Exactly, at least for me as well. Perhaps older music, mastered in analog and later put out for radio airplay (or converted to digital) by slamming all of the levels as high as they'd go, sounds better on vinyl insofar as vinyl is as close to "original" as you're going to get. The "loudness war" is a thing, for sure.
But for me, it's a hobby, and hobbies need not be completely efficient. I like fiddling with my mid-range record player, digging for albums I like, finding the one copy of a Broadway soundtrack of a wildly popular band's album that got made once and wasn't very popular[0], and just watching the record go round while I listen with decent headphones.
And, especially, reading articles like this that take a lighthearted view of taking apart a piece of kit.
0 - "American Idiot, the Musical"
- Vinyl is higher fidelity (yourself, and the article).
- Vinyl sounds better.
Vinyl colors sound, in the same way that some Vacuum Tubes color sound, which is a roundabout way of saying: They objectively make it less similar to the reference material than straight digital. But even though Vinyl is objectively worse at reproduction, some people prefer it (i.e. it subjectively sounds better to them).
Why might that be? And that question itself is when you go down a rabbit hole (e.g. Does playing a Vinyl album twice ever sound identical? And is this imperfection more pleasurable to some people than a perfect one? Etc). I don't own any Vinyl nor am I a big Vinyl aficionado, but there's undeniably a colorization when listening to a song in Vinyl Vs. digital, and then we get into the subjective realm of if this is "better" or "worse."
PS - This is true all across the audio reproduction realm. For example horn Vs. reference-style speakers, horns also heavily colorize and are quite popular (particularly for Home Theater), but are also divisive because it is objectively "worse" (but subjectively "better" for some).
Mastering for vinyl, however, takes effort. Do it wrong and the record becomes unplayable. So when you have to put in the effort anyway, might as well make it sound good at the same time.
A/B some tracks some time. Chances are the vinyl version sounds more polished with a bit more dynamics instead of having everything slam into a limiter. This has nothing to do with sound coloring or “warmth”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
To add to the differences, technological limitations of vinyl (inability to handle heavy bass) possibly affected the music that was made and published. Maybe it had to be more melodic, or something.
Some "sss" sounds are prone to producing sibilance, which can be filtered out during mastering or avoided at the recording stage.
But yeah, in both cases, you'd need to shell out at least a couple of hundred euros on speakers to fully experience either vinyls or lossless, and that has proven to be not important to the vast majority of the people.
I have a pretty large collection of lossless files, a record player, some vinyls, and speakers that allow me to tell the difference, but I still play Spotify on them like 95% of the time.
A pair of Sony MDR-7506es would do it. The workhorse cans of the recording industry.
Some vinyl releases seem to be just copy paste of a shitty digital master, but most vinyl is mastered well. This HAS to be a big reason many prefer vinyl.
Older vinyl also often has less range, but no clipping, which can make them soothing to listen to. I suppose automatic gain adjustment in Spotify gives the same result, so there’s that.
But the thing with vinyl for me are the physical things and the ritual. It’s sheer joy. I don’t have many records, maybe 30, but it’s a fun thing.
> - Vinyl is higher fidelity (yourself, and the article).
> - Vinyl sounds better.
> Vinyl colors sound, in the same way that some Vacuum Tubes color sound, which is a roundabout way of saying: They objectively make it less similar to the reference material than straight digital. But even though Vinyl is objectively worse at reproduction, some people prefer it (i.e. it subjectively sounds better to them).
It's a little more complicated that that. The technical superiority of digital audio enables mastering techniques that can make the music sound worse: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war:
> Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war."
Vinyl recording technology has technical limitations that make it far less suited to dynamic range compression (IIRC, something with groove spacing). I've read there have been some recent dual vinyl/digital releases where the vinyl version sounds objectively better because it was mastered for its medium and the digital version sounds shitty because it was mastered for loudness.
As for the wear on the vinyl - there are quite a few original pressings of Sgt Pepper. I don't mind scratching this one to hell and back!
I was going to recommend you to look into the Philips Golden Ears Challenge, but it seems that they shamefully took it down. It was this website that went at lengths to show you different aspects of sound reproduction and you could make a ton of different A/B tests for things like coloring, compression artifacts, sound stage and tonality.
When I finished it, I worried for a while this was going to ruin music for me and that I would become some kind of audiophile snob. Turns out the opposite happened. The ear training was very helpful to learn to separate the "good enough" from the "great" and the "great" from the "good-but-overpriced-audiophile-bait". I could get the $1000+ gear from a colleague who loved to spend money on audio stuff, give him an honest assessment about it and still go back contently to my $70 headphones, playing on my DIY amp and sourced from a $5 USB board...
https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/ds3502-i2c-pote...
I pick this one because it has a good guide to go with it... but this digital pot is a different value. It's 10K ohms, and the one on the board is 2K ohms. Even so, it might work (it depends on the circuit). You need to remove the pot, and connect the RL, RW, and RH pins from the board to the pot pins.
If the goal is to switch between 33 and 45 digitally, then I figure you’re better off finding that switch on the circuit board and replacing it with a relay or something.
I guess it would be fun to come up with some kind of feedback scheme that trims the digital pot automatically. But as a practical thing rather than a for the heck of it project it really doesn’t seem to be worth the effort over just using a pot.
Yeah, PID controllers are around, I think. (proportional-integral-differential.) Quite easy to do on an Arduino if not readily avaialble.
But better to PWM-control the drive transistor directly than adjust a digital pot.
I feel like most hobby projects of mine end like this: bring home a bag of stuff from fry’s, realize while futzing with the breadboard that it’s a much simpler problem than I first thought, wind up with a bag of unused stuff from fry’s because I don’t want to drive back to Burbank to return it.
- Because of the pivoting nature of the playback tonearm, you get a minimum of 2.5 degrees tracking error on the inner grooves as well. This causes some distortion.
- The very best playback cartridges have intrinsic total harmonic distortion figures up around 0.5%, which is second-worst in the audio chain, only exceeded by speakers (typically 1%-3% for good quality speakers).
Mechanically induced distortion is mainly second harmonic, though, and is less grating than odd-harmonic distortion, as you get with electrical clipping and DAC artefacts.
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.
but Technics's patents expired a few years ago (2008?) so there are a lot of knockoffs now.
Nearly all TTs are made in one factory on the east coast of China. IIRC the company is called something like Han Pin. (I have a Reloop. I love the auto braking.)
I'd say get a good quality TT aimed at DJs, rather than some "audiophile" TT with a platter "handcrafted by Tibetan monks from organic yak leather", and all the rest.
They are from the 1920s-1940s. I've spent countless hours trying to find the right turntable to buy and then the right cartridge (people say the groove widths were different in the 1920s or 30s so i need special stylus with those records but not the ones from the 40s...maybe?). It's maddening... i just want to listen to what my great-grandparents listened to without damaging the media... but it seems to take weeks of research because there are thousands of opinions.
p.s. i never met my great-grandparents and thought this would be a cool way to get to know them.
https://www.ortofon.com/ortofon-2m-78-p-598-n-1579
It shouldn't be that hard to find a decent turntable with 78 RPM.
I pulled off all my setup with Technics stuff (turn, amp, speakers) for ~300€ and, for a first time user, it's absolutely FANTASTIC.
I saw people with 2000€ setups not pulling off a better sound than mine.
The ones from then that are still around these days ... some of them can be OK, if properly reconditioned.
The ratio between the motor and turntable is likely 34:1, as that gives some reasonable speeds...
...except for the last one which is presumably for 78 but quite a bit below.> 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.
Yeah, I live in fear of this: have hundreds of CDs, plus games for various systems on CD, DVD-ROM and Blu-Ray. All of them will gradually become unreadable although, so far, I've been fortunate.
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).
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.
I tried timing a single revolution with a stopwatch, but my old man reflexes made that too inaccurate to be useful.