Turntable recommedations
I'd like to buy a good turntable for old records I've got. I've just been listening to crackly ol' "Who's Next" and I want to hear Roger Adultery's full-throated scream in higher definition without resorting to CD. A pitch control on the turntable would be desireable. Any suggestions, old fogeys?
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I'm no use as I bought a Technics in 1988 and I'm still using it...
I might try Ebay though, so any golden oldies from the past might be useful to know about....
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...though not quite THAT old! :D
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VHS videos on the other hand... Now when they're extinct in favour or recorder DVDs or Blue Ray or whatever, I don't think anyone'll be nostalgic for VHS.
Also got a load of Sabbath and Zepplin LPs the ones that only have the title on the sleeves, and just have a number on the actual record. I also got a first press of Bob Marleys Legend.
I thoroughly intend to to either flog em' when I go back home or export them to my US address, I'd also like to get a turntable or set of decks that don't have diamond tipped needles, so I can play them without slowly killing them.
I like vinyl, and I think the crackles are all part of the experience.
However like ewgf all I listen to now are MP3s (or mix CD's I make myself).
Ah great something in my forte.
Well this all depends on your budget.
One thing I have discovered over the years is that the cartage and stylus are a very very important factor in sound quality.
If budget is a consideration get a good moving magnet elliptical diamond stylus and cartage such as AudioTechnica's AT110E. This should set you back about £29. This is considered the best budget stylus/cartage ever made in recent times. Not only does it sound great it also manages to limit the amount of crackle picked up.
However if you have the money go for a moving coil stylus. These will set you back > £80, but are worth it.
Also remember the signal comming from a turntable will not be at the same volume as a CD player or Cassetedeck. You amplifier will need to have a dedecated phono stage. If not then you must by an external phono stage.
Remember the quality of the amp will also have major implications on the sound quality of your records. This should dictate how much you spend on your turntable.
Ignoring speakers for the order of precedence regarding the sound quality of the playback.
Amp > Phonostage > Cartrage/Stylus > Tonearm > Turnable.
Oh an pitch control phffft!! Dont wory too much abou it, a good deck should keep it's speed accurate.
====Mid Budget======
As for a turntable if you are on a mid price budget (i.e >100 & < 200) get something like a Systemdek IIX. Decks like these are not sold with a tonearm, so the tonearm supplied will vary. A LinBasic, Rega RB250 or RB300 will be a good combination.
**Do remember that with decks like these speed change is a manual process. To change the speed, you must lift the glass platter and place the belt on another spindle. This is easy and quick with practise. This may sound like a draw back, however by limiting the number of components the budget has been spent keeping this lovely turntable sounding sweet.**
The Systemdeck is definitely the lowest price CD beater you can get. I have one and love it.
The system Deck IIX:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Systemdek-IIX-Transcription-Turntable_W0QQitemZ320207255605QQihZ011QQcategoryZ3283QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
[/b]===Big Budget====[/b]
If you have a big budget (i.e. >= £500 & <= 1200) then give the Linn Sondeck LP12 a go. It's the vinyl enthusiast’s deck of choice. The more expensive ones have the Hercules, or Valhalla power supply fitted giving auto speed selection and improved motor glide. These decks do not usually come with a tone arm, expect and appropriate tone arm like the Linn Itok to cost around >£200 <£400.
However, only go down this route if you have a very high end amplifier else you will not notice the difference. Combine it with a MC (moving coil) stylus and cartridge else it is also a waste of money.
====Small Budget======
If you are on a small budget for gods sake please don't go for one of them DJ style decks or one of those cheap plastic record desks. The sound and crackling will be like running claws down a blackboard that’s been scratched with a knife.
If you are on a budget then go for something like a Rega Planar or Nad 533. The raga’s come in all sorts of bright colours and should set you back about £80 - £120. Get one with a good tone arm like a Rega Rb250. Most of them should come with this arm. Complement this with a AT110E stylus and cartage and you should be doing ok.
However, this will not sound quite as good as CD but will be close provided your amp as a good turntable amplifier.
========
My Golden Rule when it comes to buying audio in the 21st century. There is a lot of crap out their. So why by new what you can afford to get 10X better second hand for the same money. Providing the product you are buying has been looked after, you will reap the rewards of buying second hand.
However, if you see a turntable you like online or on ebay, run it by me and I'll give you my opinion.
Kind Regards,
Andrew.
Picked it up for a tenner from Cash Generators.
In fact most of my seperates has been scavenged from Cash Generator or car boot sales.
Technics amplifier (?30),
Technics tape deck (?19)
Denon tape deck (?10)
Pioneer tuner (?5)
Sony twin CD player/recorder (?80)
3 way celestion speakers (free)
certainly no need to spend a lot on a crappy all-in-one.
Hmmm... I get nostalgic for Betamax
And I've got a nice Philips VCR format (pre-V2000) in the shed. A weird thing from about 1975 where the tape that runs diagonally across two vertically mounted spools!
http://www.rewindmuseum.com/philips.htm
It's called "distortion", and even the best record has terrible distortion :-)
But just like valve amps sound "warmer" (that's also distortion) there are some good reasons why we might actually prefer these imperfections.
Firstly, CDs recently have been abysmally engineered: the 'loudness wars' means that for years, CDs have been horribly compressed (not data compression, but dynamic range compression) so that they have no dynamics at all in the music all in the bid to be the loudest thing in the CD changer. You'll notice compression, incidentally, if you listen to commercial radio - they compress the adverts to make them sound louder. I hates it I hates it I hates it and I don't listen to commercial radio at all any more because of this. The ads were barely tolerable at the best of time, but compressed and clip they are just painful to listen to.
Indeed, listen to the Oasis CDs (which are hardly new) - they are so badly engineered they are actually clipped. Red Hot Chili Peppers are the same, as another good example. There are some really great songs on Californication as an example - played with great skill, but the idiots who engineered it have rendered them almost unlistenable.
But you can't do that with a vinyl record. If you do, you cause the needle to jump out of the groove. So while compression is necessary to make a vinyl record (they have much less dynamic range than a CD), they can't just shove the volume up to 11 and clip the waveform, or the record just won't play.
That's also the thing about valve amps. When you do start putting too much amplitude in them, they don't clip harshly like digital, or even analogue solid state will. Guitarists apparently use this distortion to make the unique valve amp electric guitar sound.
The other thing why we may prefer imperfect sounds is because...the imperfection might actually be psychologically more pleasing. Digital might sound "too perfect". For example, I have both a Roland A90 keyboard - which is superb, with fantastic grand piano emulation - not only does the character of the sound change as you go up and down the keyboard's octaves, but the character (not just the volume) of the sound changes with velocity (as what happens with a real piano, velocity, by the way, means how hard you strike a key). But somehow, I prefer my old, imperfect, but real piano; the sound is more appealing even if it's no Steinway.
However, a digital recording is a sampled rendition of sound, therefore can not fully convey the detail of the original waveform it can only approximate.
A digital music is to sound what a digalalised image is to the photo. Therefore the details in the wave forms can be lost just as an image is pixelated up close and personal.
There are pro's and cons of both formats ignoring the convenience factor.
However, it can be summed up thus. Records engeneered from non digital sound sources ie. <= aprox 1984 sound better on Vinyl. Songs recorded after this time sound better when re-rendered on a digital medium.
Yeah it's true. Rock music was made for vinyl - the guitars just sound more full blooded coming off it. I always disliked the feeling of space between the instruments that CD seems to exaggerate. If music was just a science then CD is miles better, but "Paperback Writer" for example should only be heard one way, and that's on vinyl... in mono!
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That's no different to a record though. The recording on a record or analogue tape does not convey the full detail of the original waveform - they don't have infinite bandwidth. What's more, vinyl loses bandwidth as the needle gets closer to the centre of the record.
Digital audio CDs have much more dynamic range than vinyl, and preserve the original sound much better than vinyl (when properly engineered). IIRC, CD audio has something like 80dB of dynamic range, and records are down at about 55-60dB of dynamic range - so the record loses a lot more of the original sound that the band was making.
But the engineers can't screw with a record. They either use the RIAA eq curve or it sounds terrible on a record, so they can't compress the hell out of it till it clips, or the needle jumps out of the groove. So you don't get horrible sounding clipped records - but they do take these liberties with CDs (listen to the examples I gave for how dreadful a badly engineered CD sounds)
That’s why records before 1984 sound so good on vinyl because right from Producer in the recording studio to the cutting engineer this was taken into account. It is true they were working within tighter confines creatively however this meant the engineers across the board really had to know their stuff; consequently the mastering was of very high quality when buying a quality record. Unless you brought a cheap K-Tel compilation and the like.
Nowadays any its not nearly as difficult to master a digital recording with a fairly accurate interpretation. Consequently, the art of fine recording technique is being lost. The digital recoding is to the producer what the calculator is to the high school maths class, people these days really don’t have a deep level of understanding.
I have never had a needle bounce out of a groove due to sound recorded on them. True though it would make it more likely on a dusty or dirty record. If you want a large degree of stereo separation and a large range between the loudest and quietest sound then that’s what a 12" single is for. Else we can just turn up the volume a little bit and achieve the same effect.
As for distortion being greater near the centre of the record this is true to a large extent only if your needle is missaligned.
A needle sweeps an arc across the surface of the record. IF you alighn you cartage right you limit the effects making it almost equal across the record. It is also the reason the quieter tracks are recorded near the centre of the records. High volume recordings will cause minor distortion in the centre on the best of recordings and the best of turntables/cartridge/tonearm combo’s. That’s why high quality recordings are never wound to tight to the centre.
To sum up I should imagine there are more carelessly produced CD’s in the world than there are carelessly produces Vinyl recordings.
The main problem isn't so much the alignment of the cartridge, but the inevitable and unavoidable loss of bandwidth as you get closer to the centre. Records are constant angular velocity - i.e. the angular change is constant per unit time. The consequence of this is the groove is moving faster past the needle on the outside of the record compared to the inside, and as a result, the bandwidth of the outside of a record is much higher than the bandwidth of the inside - the record gets lossier as you get towards the centre because the groove is passing the needle much more slowly.
CDs, by contrast, use constant linear velocity to avoid the available bandwidth changing as the head moves from the centre to the outside - so the RPMs a CD spins is faster when the head is reading an inner track, and slower when the outer tracks are being read.
Even with that taken into account the inner groove of a record still offers higher playback resolution than a CD.
However, a high resolution digital format such as the SACD does get much closer to the detail and warmth of vinyl sound.
Another analogy,
The standard CD is to Vinyl what the Sky Digibox images are to analogue TV broadcasts from the BBC (Sky Digital being pixelated and lacking in detail).
CD and Vinyl?
CD and SACD?
In my mind DVD audio and SACD are about one and the same in sound quality.
CDs have a linear frequency response from 20Hz to 20kHz, which is greater than the range of human hearing. So if you had the theoretical perfect record deck, and could actually get higher frequencies out of the record (which would almost certainly be worn off in the first playing and therefore gone in the second), you wouldn't be able to hear them anyway.
Records have a much narrower dynamic range, something like 60dB versus the 90dB that a CD has.
The "warmth" of a record is almost entirely due to distortion and the RIAA eq curve, and nothing to do with anything techincally better (because records are technically inferior to the CD in every important respect, including the faithfulness of the recording, in data terms, the record contains much less data than the equivalent CD). The comparison with the Sky Digibox isn't really valid; a comparison to a Sky Digibox is however valid if you want to compare a record and a 128kbit/s MP3. All things being equal, a standard CD contains far more acoustic information than a record, and this is reflected in its much greater dynamic range; by the time a record is getting towards the upper end of human hearing there's already been significant attenuation of the signal. That information will also get reproduced far more accurately: the motor drive of the CD player won't add its twopennyworth to the sound, you won't get feedback effects of the pickup actually picking up the vibrations from the speakers from the output, you won't get faint echo effects from the read head picking up adjacent tracks like you get with records.
That's not to say that people often find the warmth (i.e. distortion) on a typical record more pleasing compared to the rather more perfect (given a good sound engineer) fidelity of a CD. But the pleasing "warmth" is actually caused by the vinyl record's technical inferiority - a record is in actual fact far more compressed than a CD. But humans are fickle beasts, and what might sound pleasing may not be the technically superior, especially given the limitations of records which means they must be properly engineered in the first place (where you can get away with not properly engineering a CD).
The same thing goes for valve amps - the "pleasing warmth" of a valve amp is entirely due to the distortion it adds, and nothing to do with the fidelity (which is rather less than a modern transistor amp).
Even at very high volumes a well set up system will suffer very little from audio feedback. The one downside of vinyl is that it?s not as easy to get right as CD.
CD's may be on paper better than vinyl but sound quality is subjective; in music the measure of quality should not be the output of an oscilloscope rather the enjoyment of the listener.
For me the center groove of a record still beats the cold sound of a CD.
BTW My CD player was ?320 new so is not some cheap n nasty peice of crap from Dixons. Still I beleive my Systemdek IIX has it beat.
1. get a cotton bud and clean your ears out
2. play something decent...bee gees sound crap no matter what the format is
3. don't attempt to sing along as this negates the purpose of trying to achieve as pure a sound as possible
4. listen while intoxicated or have smoked something illegal
5. Stuff always sounds better when your trying to annoy someone who hates the band your listening too
Just a few tips that really don't cost too much and yield a really good results.
Which is precisely the point I was actually making :-)
Having said that, if you really wanted to, you could make a sound system that made a CD sound like a record. Just add some noise, the odd crackle, some flutter and wow, a little bit of pre-echo at the threshold of hearing, all perfectly possible with a good DSP. Well, you'd need a properly engineered CD too, which seems quite hard to get hold of thanks to the 'loudness wars'. Sigh.
Are you sure they even sound better in that sense or its not just the nostalgia thing getting in the way!
Next you'll be saying speccy games are better than xbox360 games...oh wait!
If I wanted sound like that it would be cheaper and alot less hastle to get one of these:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/BUSH-ACOUSTICS-MTT1-MINI-TURNTABLE_W0QQitemZ120212469023QQihZ002QQcategoryZ3283QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Minus your last little paragraph I have to agree with you, after all you put up a very convincing argument. To not change my plee in the face of that would be foolish.
In any case, I dont have the time to do the backround research and keep up with you. It's much easier to wave the white flag. :p
Records don't just sound better because of distortion, there's more to it than that.
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Good TT/Tonearm/Stylus combination does not crackle and pop. Pre/post echo only happens on cheap mastered vinyl. There are as many drawbacks on cheap mastered CD's too.
I think Winston you would like the sound of a good vinyl set up.
I strongly agree here.....You can't beat a qaulity record deck...even if its going into a modern cinema sound type amp as mine is.
I have Technics SL-1210 MK2's and they really do sound good, ive tried vinyl, CD's, Minidisc's, and MP'3's and Vinyl comes out top in my opinion. CD and Minidisc's are close 2nd and MP3's are the worst (even at 320Kbps). I guess people have gone for MP'3's for the space saving aspects and convenience, but you really do have to have a Tin-Ear to think they sound as good as the others.:lol:
Vinyl and CD's for me!;-) Vinyl for highest qaulity and CD's for being lazy!:grin:
b-b-but I like the crackles and pops.
I like a nice scratchy 90 year old 78 playing on a knackered old turntable with a blunt stylus and a rusty bearing. When I hear a pure copy of the record it sounds empty! :-)
If you like the sound of your Technics SL-1210 MK2?s you should try a real record deck, you will be pleasantly surprised.
The Technics SL-1210 MK2?s is a sturdy bugger but engeneered for being flung in and out the back of a van and for tricks that on other decks would be classed pysical abuse i.e DJing. One good thing about the SL-1210 MK2?s is that they are low maintenance.
Yes you are right here about them being very sturdy and the being designed for DJ's to throw in and out of vans!:lol: they are Bomb-Proof! lol, I have seen the purist record decks too, the ones made of glass with the belt around the outside etc. Its just in my case I was into beat mixing and I kept the two decks as they sound very good and are solid engineering (which I have a bit of an appreciation for):smile: but yes you are right the more delicate high end stuff probably sounds even better.