Teach me a thing or two about record players

wcelliot wrote: +1 on CDs. Basically, the better your system gets, the better analog gets and the worse CDs sound... because all your system can do is reproduce what's on the recording and there is simply more info available on an analog recording... you just have to get through the mechanical process used to get to it.

There are plenty of problems with analog as well. One big stumbling block for CDs is the quality of players widely available. Most of them stink. The DA-AD converters are just cheap and the player itself needs more mass.

Unfortunately, good oversampling converters cost more than most people are willing to pay, especially if they can't appreciate the difference. Audio BBs like audioasylum.com are full of grassroot-y mods for getting better sound out of certain cheap players.

Better systems reveal more signal on analog recordings and reveal more gaps (sampling and frequency) in digital ones. But in casual listening, the CD will seem to sound better because of the "cleaner" sound.

Another problem is how well the source material is recorded. I've heard some well-recorded gorgeous CDs and some skunky vinyl done in by bad technique and lousy pressing.

SACD's are much much better... but not yet widely available.

Don't know if the format will take off. Most folks don't care.

But so many people now listen to nothing but mp3s (which are not only digital but badly compressed) of digitally recorded music that a CD recorded from a master analog tape seems downright audiophile quality by comparison.

mp3s sound like E36 M3 on a good setup.

You didn't really give us any idea of a budget but for an entry level audiophile table Pro-Ject makes a great table, the Debut 3 that can be upgraded when you want to make it better.

http://www.project-audio.com/main.php?prod=debut&cat=turntables&lang=en

You will need a phono preamp $100-$200 will buy a nice one, I just got a Caimbridge Audio 540P for $100.

Stay away from anything USB or with a built in preamp. They are usually cheap units that will RUIN your records and never sound very good.

Shop around on E-Bay or Craigslist and then punch in the model numbers on www.vinylengine.com and see what people are saying about them.

Finally whatever you get make sure to take the time to set it up properly, level the platter, get the tracking force right and align the cartridge.

fast_eddie_72 wrote: My rig is an SL 1200, an old Rotel pre-amp from the 90s, a PP EL84 amp pulled from a Motorola console that I've recapped and such all driving a pair of AR LST2s I refoamed and recapped. I love it and I think it sounds outstanding.

Actually, I'd like to hear that rig.

There are plenty of problems with analog as well. One big stumbling block for CDs is the quality of players widely available. Most of them stink. The DA-AD converters are just cheap and the player itself needs more mass

Very true. I should have said that digital systems peak early in the improvement curve rather than they simply get worse as you improve them. ;-) There are definitely improvements available with most players.

I have a Cambridge CD player and I really like it... it's known for its particularly high quality DAC... and it blows the doors off the 24bit DAC my THX receiver claims...

You might find it amusing that the guy who makes the platter mat I like so well also makes one to stick to cds to add mass. I think it makes a difference (ntohing like the platter mat though), but I'm also aware of the power of expectations. ;-)

Jerry From LA wrote: Actually, I'd like to hear that rig.

Never fails to bring a smile to my face. Looks cool too. I got way into the used/diy/thrift store type deal. I've had a lot of stuff through the house. Damn near turned into one of those people you see on those hoarder shows. But I sold a lot off, all at way more than I paid for it, and settled on this. I love it. And I'm a big believer in that 90% there philosophy. I really enjoy listening to better systems, but part of the pleasure I get from my set up is hearing a load of systems that cost a ton of money that don't sound nearly as good.

Turntable wise, I've whittled it down to the SL 1200, a direct drive Denon (not the really, really nice ones- one of the lower versions from that line), a BIC (don't laugh, that little guy sounds good) and an ELAC Miracord 50h. The ELAC may be my best table, but I need to rewire the tone arm. Oh, thers a Garrard kicking around somewhere too.

So, back on topic. When someone says they want to listen to some records but don't want to spend a load of money, I always tell them to just find something good, vintage and inexpensive. Get something good enough to "get it". If you want more, there's plenty of ways to spend more money down the road. But you don't have to run out and get a VPI Scout as an "introductory" turntable just to listen to some records and have them sound good.

Most important thing is to have fun and enjoy what you have.

One thing to think about with a phono pre-amp: I found that a lot of the seemingly cheap battery powered pre-amps actually sounded as good or better than the mid-line wall powered versions. Something about less interference. I forget exactly.

fast_eddie_72 wrote: No worries. I know a lot of people are really passionate about the DD vs. belt thing.

You are kidding right? Wake up call: Nobody cares about a technology that for all intents and purposes died with the advent of the CD over a quarter-century ago. Convenience trumps quality, and lossy compressed digital formats rule.

I am constantly amazed at the depth of knowledge exhibited here. Twenty years ago, I might have called myself an audiophile, but while I may have more in the way of cash to spend on such indulgences, I haven't the time or inclination. I do have a working turntable, one of those dreadful direct drive types, and I may just blow the dust off of it and drag an LP record out and play it in celebration of the diverse and incredibly deep wealth of expertise that is the GRM forum. Thank you.

Did you know that a good percentage of new albums are still released on vinyl? Definitely not mainstream, but not dead.

I admit I buy the CD first before I bother checking to see if it's available in analog though. ;-)

Marty! wrote: Technics 1200 with a Ortofon cartridge. May not have the sound quality that audiophiles look for, but hey if that's what you want a vinyl record won't give it to you anyway. 1200's are also pretty damn durable and parts are readily available. There's a reason they are THE go to turntable for DJ's.

We use 1200's 1210s at the "pool at harrahs" for the DJs.. they get all sorts of nasty crap spilled on them, abused by the DJs, chucked into the road cases, rolled across an uneven stone floor, and stored in a cold room after being used all night in a hot an humid environment.

Aside from the DJs yanking the RCA cords out of them to screw with the other DJs (non replacable, you have to open the turntable up and solder new ones on.. we hate having to do that) they have given us ZERO issues in almost 5 years of use

What's ironic is CDs have actually made vinyl much better! Vinyl is no longer a "mass market" product. So the over compressed "let's see how loud we can make it" master goes to CD. Vinyl is almost exclusively an "audiophile" product now. Ever new record I've gotten in the last five years or so sounds really good.

God I need a record player. I have a whole pile of records and nothing to listen to them on. I do have a slightly off topic but still kinda connected subject. A couple of the records I have I can't find on CDs or digital form. I would like to add them to my iPod because well it is hard to carry vinyl with you and listen to it. What is the best way to do this?

I had it all set up with my desktop for a while. A desktop is usually easier than a laptop because there is a stereo in on a lot of the sound cards. On a laptop, you usually only have "mic" which is mono.

I can't recall what software I used. I got it on the internet and it wasn't expensive. Worked great. I think there are several different ones available. Maybe someone will have a specific suggestion.

You can get those "USB Turntables". The USB part may be just fine, but the turntable tends to be junk. And the whole thing costs less than a decent pre-amp, so you can't expect much there. So, I'd avoid that route unless you really don't care about the sound quality at all.

Jerry, I have to say that I agree with you about belt-drive, but the only reason I ever let my Yamaha P-450 go was because the belt supply seemed to completely dry up in the mid 1990s. I'm not playing any of my old records at the moment because the only TT I have is an old BSR with autoreturn and the "stacking" feature that I inherited from my grandmother (I'm too afraid that the thing will damage my vintage vinyl, but can't throw it out because of the family value). Anyway..are parts for the great turntables of the past available?

Can't let the thread go without saying that in the same inheritance, I got a Marantz 2238B reciever! Still sounds great, and tough as nails! Only thing wrong with it is that every light bulb but one has burned out.

friedgreencorrado wrote: Jerry, I have to say that I agree with you about belt-drive, but the only reason I ever let my Yamaha P-450 go was because the belt supply seemed to completely dry up in the mid 1990s. I'm not playing any of my old records at the moment because the only TT I have is an old BSR with autoreturn and the "stacking" feature that I inherited from my grandmother (I'm too afraid that the thing will damage my vintage vinyl, but can't throw it out because of the family value). Anyway..are parts for the great turntables of the past available? Can't let the thread go without saying that in the same inheritance, I got a Marantz 2238B reciever! Still sounds great, and tough as nails! Only thing wrong with it is that every light bulb but one has burned out.

Here in LA, we have these old electronic supply houses piled high with old drive belts and surplus do-dads from days of yore. I needed a DIN plug to adapt my Quad 303 power amp (a Canadian eBay score) to my PS Audio preamp (a $40 eBay find with a very good phono stage). These guys have bags of the stuff.

Replace the burned out bulbs in the receiver with LEDs. They consume far less power but remember they have a polarity.

At the moment, I'm rocking a McIntosh M250 amp that I rescued from inside a wall. Hadn't made a peep since 1992 when the old man who owned it passed away. I cleaned and polished it, used a variac to reshape the caps, then replaced the output devices with improved versions (one of the originals shorted when a resistor failed. I replaced a bunch of resisters too). Its -3db point is 10 Hz. Unfortunately, I'm speakerless at the moment but my wife's Infinitys are standing in.

Jerry From LA wrote:

friedgreencorrado wrote: Jerry, I have to say that I agree with you about belt-drive, but the only reason I ever let my Yamaha P-450 go was because the belt supply seemed to completely dry up in the mid 1990s. I'm not playing any of my old records at the moment because the only TT I have is an old BSR with autoreturn and the "stacking" feature that I inherited from my grandmother (I'm too afraid that the thing will damage my vintage vinyl, but can't throw it out because of the family value). Anyway..are parts for the great turntables of the past available? Can't let the thread go without saying that in the same inheritance, I got a Marantz 2238B reciever! Still sounds great, and tough as nails! Only thing wrong with it is that every light bulb but one has burned out.

Here in LA, we have these old electronic supply houses piled high with old drive belts and surplus do-dads from days of yore. I needed a DIN plug to adapt my Quad 303 power amp (a Canadian eBay score) to my PS Audio preamp (a $40 eBay find with a very good phono stage). These guys have bags of the stuff. Replace the burned out bulbs in the receiver with LEDs. They consume far less power but remember they have a polarity. At the moment, I'm rocking a McIntosh M250 amp that I rescued from inside a wall. Hadn't made a peep since 1992 when the old man who owned it passed away. I cleaned and polished it, used a variac to reshape the caps, then replaced the output devices with improved versions (one of the originals shorted when a resistor failed. I replaced a bunch of resisters too). Its -3db point is 10 Hz. Unfortunately, I'm speakerless at the moment but my wife's Infinitys are standing in.

Consider me properly wowed about the McIntosh! And I hear ya about the speakers..at the moment, I've got the Marantz hooked up to a pair of Pioneer HPM-40s that I found at a yard sale 10yrs. ago (around the same time I inherited the Marantz in the first place). The first system I bought as a young adult in the early 1980s was all Yamaha "Natural Sound" era stuff. I did a lil' internet research (looking at pix, mostly.. ) and it looks like in addition to the P-450 I mentioned before, I also had a K-550 cassette deck, and a CR-440 reciever. Can't recall the model number on the speakers, but my fuzzy recollection of Yamaha's nomenclature makes me think they were NS-12s.

I still have the 440 in a box somewhere, it broke in the mid-1990s. My mom took it to a local (Atlanta) shop to have it repaired for my birthday in 1995 or so, but it only lasted about a year (I think one of the big capacitors in the back was the problem) before it died again. I'd love to have it back, but I honestly can't say whether or not whether it'd be for the audio quality or the nostalgic value.

Apolgies for hijacking the thread..as far as turntables go, if I had an artistic bone in my body, I'd be making a great T-shirt design for belt-drive. I still think that if you can isolate the parts that actually reproduce the sound (cartridge/needle/etc.) from the vibration caused by the mechanical parts required to spin up the disc in the first place (the motor), you'll get less "rumble" when trying to play something at home. In addition, I think the current love of direct drive turntables today is because of their usage in hip-hop & rap. DJs in a dance club need something that comes up to speed rapidly as they manipulate ("sample") individual portions of songs that are only available on vinyl. And since a dance club (regardless of era) is so loud anyway, rumble isn't one of their concerns.

EDIT: Marty's right about the old Technics DD tables. I forgot that a club DJ would be spinning the thing backwards just as often as s/he'd be spinning it forward. That kind of abuse would be hell on a belt.

wcelliot wrote: Did you know that a good percentage of new albums are still released on vinyl? Definitely not mainstream, but not dead. I admit I buy the CD first before I bother checking to see if it's available in analog though. ;-)

I had heard rumors, but promptly dismissed them as lunatic ramblings. Where in the world would one go to peruse and perhaps buy a new release on vinyl??

Independent music shops in big cities seem to often have a pretty big vinyl selection. Other than that I'd guess you'd have to order it online.

Believe it or not, Amazon carries new vinyl!

Ebay (some releases NA in the US... I had to go to the UK for my "Beatles 1") is always interesting, and some Hot Topics mall stores even carry (or used to carry.. haven't checked lately) an eclectic mix of new/reissued vinyl.

But the best selection is as Corey suggests... and aside form big cities, college towns also tend to have at least one shop carrying vinyl.

And Eddie is right... if they bother to make a pressing today, the quality is almost always awesome... because they know who their market is.

friedgreencorrado wrote: I still think that if you can isolate the parts that actually reproduce the sound (cartridge/needle/etc.) from the vibration caused by the mechanical parts required to spin up the disc in the first place (the motor), you'll get less "rumble" when trying to play something at home. In addition, I think the current love of direct drive turntables today is because of their usage in hip-hop & rap. DJs in a dance club need something that comes up to speed rapidly as they manipulate ("sample") individual portions of songs that are only available on vinyl.

Just a couple of thoughts...

You're absolutely right, you simply cannot use a belt drive for an application like that.

Now, flash back to an era before CDs. The "good" source was vinyl, and radio stations that wanted good sound played records. You would cue for radio the same way- I had to do it in my "radio production" class even though it was the early 90s at that point and we would almost certainly never need that skill.

So Technics, a big player at the time, designed their top of the line turntable with those thoughts in mind. And indeed, the SL1200 and its related SL 1000 with separate tone arm became broadcast standards. Mine used to be in an edit room in a television station.

Okay, but bulletproof isn't everything. The SL 1200 had a huge, huge potential return for Technics. They were setting out to attract a pretty big hunk of a pretty big market (which they got) so they spent a lot of R&D. If you compare that to a boutique "audiophile" builder today, they sell what are very nearly their prototype designs. Many are very light weight, to the point of being what I'd call fragile. At least the ones under a grand. And that can be bad. Isolation is key with turntables, and mass at rest tends to stay at rest. The big, brick like Technics is solid. You can knock on the thing with your knuckle while it's playing and hear nothing transmitted to the cart.

By contrast, a Rega or Music Hall will pick up your footsteps as you cross the room. So the belt isolation isn't really getting you a lot. The plinth is so light the vibration of the motor is transmitted directly or through the furniture. The better belt designs have the motor and power supply outside the turntable and only the belt connects the two. So the vibration can only be transmitted through the furniture they're sitting on.

I'm not saying it well, but the point being, an SL1200 may be "direct drive" but people misunderstand what that means. The platter is driven by magnets. There's no "motor" as in a belt drive, the platter is part of the motor. And the motor is amazingly torquey. It gets up to speed right now, but that platter is still pretty heavy. So it easily damps the motor pulses. And the mass of the table absorbs a load of vibration. If you've ever seen one in pieces, there's a big, heavy kind of rubber thing in there that fills much of the table volume. Damping is everywhere in that table, unlike the inexpensive audiophile belts.

So it comes down to performance by cost. I have no doubt that even an "entry level" VPI sounds better than an SL1200, but their "cheap" table costs more than my whole system. I'll stack my SL 1200 against a Rega any day. That's more of an apples to apples comparison because the cost is much closer. And in that price range, the Technics is, in my opinion, vastly superior. I've used both and can't imagine taking a Rega over a Technics.

Jeez, one last thing- set up is everything on a turntable. An SL is easy to set up and has all the adjustments you need. You can set VTA on the fly. Many of the audiophile tables don't have any VTA adjustment, or have a very crude design that makes it impossible to make very fine adjustment. Getting VTA right is critical to making a table sound its best.

Most cities have a independent store which sells vinyl. Actually Best Buy and Hot Topic carry vinyl as well.

I agree with your synopsis of the 1200. The 1200/1210 is a surprisingly heavy turntable...

Something else they do that low end do not.. the needle assembly is an entire cartridge that can be exchanged in no time at all.. unlike trying to set up an individual needle

mad_machine wrote: I agree with your synopsis of the 1200. The 1200/1210 is a surprisingly heavy turntable... Something else they do that low end do not.. the needle assembly is an entire cartridge that can be exchanged in no time at all.. unlike trying to set up an individual needle

I think this is a convienance plus but a minor performance minus. Especially if you get a former "DJ" table. They're fond of licking the contacts to get them to connect. Not great for them over time. You have to keep those things clean or they absolutely can introduce noise. But, that along with the easy to adjust tracking, anti-skate and VTA make it really easy to use a couple of different carts on one table, which is neat.

93EXCivic wrote: God I need a record player. I have a whole pile of records and nothing to listen to them on. I do have a slightly off topic but still kinda connected subject. A couple of the records I have I can't find on CDs or digital form. I would like to add them to my iPod because well it is hard to carry vinyl with you and listen to it. What is the best way to do this?

Pretty easy really Turntable to preamp or reciever if yours has a phono preamp in it. Then you need a 3.5 to RCA cable to go from the tape out on your reciever or the outputs on youre preamp to the line in port on your pc's sound card.

Once thats all hooked up get a program called Vinyl Studio, costs about $30 depending on what the euro is doing and is worth every penny. It is very automated and practically walks you through the process of creating a nice digital copy of your record. It even downloads the track names and album art for you.

fast_eddie_72 wrote:

mad_machine wrote: Something else they do that low end do not.. the needle assembly is an entire cartridge that can be exchanged in no time at all.. unlike trying to set up an individual needle

In my days of hanging out with DJ's most brought their own cartridges when playing a gig. This was a benefit as some of the records they played were one of a kinds or uber rare. Nobody wanted to take a chance on scratching their records with dull needles.

I'm chiming in late and I'm no audiophile. In fact, I'm the opposite. I have an awesome vinyl collection though, picked from thrift stores and opportunistic giveaways.

My turntable looks like this:

It has an 8 track player in it as well, and I have a few of those. It makes for great fun, but not always fro great listening. I have some crazy old school spoken word poetry readings of like Wordsworth, and short stories by Mellville, read by Sir Arthur John Gielgud and the like, which combined with the popping and crackle make for good times.

Some folks just get too crazy over this E36 M3. One of my buddies had aa high dollar turntable amplified with tubes in some weird display case. Looked like these:

Problem is, when you're wasted and you or a buddy falls over onto the hi fi while you're listening to old Moody Blues records or something, you can't just straighten it all out and order a new needle from the needle doctor.