Hi Michaelab,
It is good to see you are interested in getting into turntables. They can be great fun and open you up to a whole new world of music and record collecting. One of the big downsides of getting a turntable is getting to hear a lot of the options. The shop you tried has a very small range. But you can't go far wrong with a Rega as a first deck.
The P5 is a strong seller for Rega as it is at a popular price point. With some strong competition. I'm glad you had a decent listen to it.
The seller came out with some interesting points.
He said: "you know, people go on about source first and expensive cables and stuff but really, 90% of the sound of a system is down to the speakers and how they interact with the room. Then you need an amp that's capable of driving the speakers properly and then you can worry about the source. As for cables, just use any good quality stuff, they don't make any significant difference".
One thing about the source first way of thinking is that any half decent budget amp & speakers will show differences in the turntable front end. Highly revealing amps & speakers will show up poorer tuntables. The source first applies well with turntables because to improve them you need to build them better. By design, materials and tolerences. This puts the cost up.
This is not to say that amp & speakers are not important.
I would say get the best turntable you afford. Try in your system to see if it does the job for you.
Then he talked for a while about TT design and hifi equipment design in general and he said: "Good hifi is first and foremost designed to extremely tight objective criteria. Take a TT, it's a precision mechanical machine that has to be built to extremely tight tolerances. You can't make a decent TT by ear. The only bit where I reckon tuning by ear is useful is in the final tweaking of speaker cabinets and crossovers, provided you've got the basics right".
I generally agree with this. With turntables, design, materials & build are most important for a good sound. There are areas that tweaking by ear can be done. Setting up a cartridge, the fine tuning can be done by ear. Placement of the deck can be done as well.
I asked him about what he thinks of the Rega TT PSU upgrade for the P5 (standard on the P7). He said: "well, I can't tell you because I haven't evaluated it properly yet. Sure, I've played around with it a bit and on that basis I don't think it makes a worthwhile difference but I haven't evaluated it properly. To do that I'll have to spend one Sunday with two identically setup P5s, one with the PSU and one without and then do some extended blind A/B listening tests to see what, if any, differences there really are". When I've done that I can tell you whether it's worth spending money on or whether you'd be better off upgrading your cart or just buying more music.
Generally the thinking is for better PSU first before cartridge. A better power supply will feed the motor with a purer mains. This should control the motor better, allow less noise, vibration & interference getting into the platter, turntable, arm & cartridge. It also allows the platter to rotate at a more constant speed. All the big hitting turntables have power supplies, some very fancy. Try the PSU should be fun.
Towards the end of the afternoon we spun a few tracks on the Clearaudio Reference setup he had just for comparison. OK, there was a touch more detail, the soundstage was a bit wider and deeper and a bit more clearly defined but it was a long way from being a night and day difference. I asked him about the P7 and he said: "to be honest, it's not really worth it. If you want to spend more money, spend it on a better cart or more music, unless you want to go all the way to a P9. The P5 really is a giant killer. Way better than the P25 and not that far off the P9 or any absolute top of the range TT setup you care to mention."
In one way, I'm surprised there wasn't a bigger difference. There should have been for the money. I have heard the Clearaudio at shows and it has never really impressed me. I have only heard the P9 at shows but have heard a number of very good reports. Other more expensive decks should produce a bigger difference and a more enjoyable sound.
There are millions of pieces of vinyl of music of different styles waiting to be found. Explore and enjoy.
SCIDB
And while I'm not about to spout source-first dogma, we can't find true satisfaction in theories, only in listening.
