Turntable thoughts

This kind of thing does put me off buying second hand. I bought a cheapo Yamaha deck for about £30 of ebay, the cables were damaged that goes into the stylus so only the last tracks on a 12" would play through both speakers.

I also bought a Dual which worted fine for 3 days, then it started skipping, the stylus was useless, I had to buy a new cartridge and stylus. I was 16 at the time and I had no money I remember pleeding with the saleman at Practifcal HIFI, I had loads of pennies and pound coins in the end he let me have it for £18! They were selling them for £35 at the time.

In fact the only turntable never to let me down is my project, its all its needed is a new cartirdge and stylus. The belt is ok but may need replacing soon, I have a spare but can't find it.

I've had five turntbales in total, all the second hand ones had some kind of major fault with them.

 

If you buy second hand you have to budget for a new cartridge. If you spend a reasonable amount you are unlikely to get stung. On the other hand there is a chance a fault may develop. But to improve on your Pro-ject new you'll spend a lot of money at least £400 to get a worthwhile improvement. You could buy a second hand Heybrook for £100-£150 and get something not that short of an LP12 when you've fettled it, mind you it might cost you a bit to do the work. You should be looking for at least a P3 or better to improve. I think you'd be happier with something like that, at least you'd know it was unlikely to break. If you could save up and get a P25 even better. Perhaps look at some of the better Pro-jects too. You're only going to worry if you buy a genuine oldie

 

Yeah I think I shall wait until I am in a full time job and my finances are at least half way decent. I guess its all to with ecomonies of scale, you have to spend a lot more to gain little improvements.

I am really useless at engineering things though, I once tried to replace the rusted interconnects on my dual, I ended up short circuiting the entire PCB. Its why I had to give up my electronics course at college I was just too slow at the physical side of things.

I am better than average, I can fix things and I can just about solder, its just machinics scare the crap out of me, so I am useless with tunrtables. I can't even change spark plugs in cars.

It looks like my Project I have had for five years is here to stay.

 

Bloody hell! That is *really* fast.
BTW, it's too late now I guess, but the little Roksan is a really nice deck (as, no doubt, is the Proj). Looks lovely in Maple, too.

 

It's an advantage of using a 'paint pad' to scrub the record rather than the built in brush; it has a very large surface area so cleans effectively with very few revolutions. I manually apply the fluid to the record from a bottle, give it a couple of rotations whilst firmly scrubbing with the paint pad, then hoover off the solution, though if I come in at under a minute per record it wont be by much.

Tony.