Turntable thoughts

[amazingtrade]

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.

 

[lordsummit]

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

 

[amazingtrade]

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.

 

[joel]

It takes Tony L less than a minute to do a record on both sides on his VPI

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.

 

[TonyL]

Bloody hell! That is *really* fast.

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.