7 ms·

Inside A £30 Record Player

83 points by edent 6y ago

avolcano 6y ago
I'm a pretty casual vinyl listener (mostly got into it since I like having a physical representation of the music I love, and to reclaim some sense of ownership in a world defined by Spotify and Apple Music). I enjoyed this post, and more or less agree with the author's opinion that claims of superior vinyl audio quality are bunk - and particularly meaningless in a world where most new music is recorded or produced digitally in the first place. That said, I probably still would avoid a cheapo player like this that does not have an adjustable tone arm. For one, it's more likely to have issues skipping when you can't adjust it properly. The second concern - which I'll admit I have no data to back up, and since this is an opinion from the audiophile community, may warrant some skepticism - is that cheap players with unbalanced tone arms are infamous for supposedly wearing down records more quickly over time by applying too much pressure. The author's note about the stereo output being unbalanced, by the way, is a relatively common side effect of an unbalanced tone arm (though there's various other reasons it can occur).
- swimfar 6y ago
  Even a lot of relatively cheap record players have adjutable tonearm weights. But it's not just the vertical needle force that wears out the records. The other issue is lack of adjustable (or any) anti-skate force. This keeps the needle from being forced to one side of the groove. I stumbled across the article recently where someone set up an A/B test to try to observe record damage from these cheap turntables. While there are some limitations of the experiment, I thought it was a good idea. There are too many "facts" that are just accepted as true without any emperical observation (not just in the audio community). https://www.audioappraisal.com/will-a-cheap-turntable-damage-your-records/ https://www.audioappraisal.com/will-a-cheap-turntable-damage...
  - avolcano 6y ago
    Yeah, I didn't mean to imply you had to break the bank to avoid damaging your records. And good note on the anti-skate tracking as well!
- techsupporter 6y ago
  > I enjoyed this post, and more or less agree with the author's opinion that claims of superior vinyl audio quality are bunk - and particularly meaningless in a world where most new music is recorded or produced digitally in the first place. Exactly, at least for me as well. Perhaps older music, mastered in analog and later put out for radio airplay (or converted to digital) by slamming all of the levels as high as they'd go, sounds better on vinyl insofar as vinyl is as close to "original" as you're going to get. The "loudness war" is a thing, for sure. But for me, it's a hobby, and hobbies need not be completely efficient. I like fiddling with my mid-range record player, digging for albums I like, finding the one copy of a Broadway soundtrack of a wildly popular band's album that got made once and wasn't very popular[0], and just watching the record go round while I listen with decent headphones. And, especially, reading articles like this that take a lighthearted view of taking apart a piece of kit. 0 - "American Idiot, the Musical"
- Someone1234 6y ago
  There's two different arguments being conflated: - Vinyl is higher fidelity (yourself, and the article). - Vinyl sounds better. Vinyl colors sound, in the same way that some Vacuum Tubes color sound, which is a roundabout way of saying: They objectively make it less similar to the reference material than straight digital. But even though Vinyl is objectively worse at reproduction, some people prefer it (i.e. it subjectively sounds better to them). Why might that be? And that question itself is when you go down a rabbit hole (e.g. Does playing a Vinyl album twice ever sound identical? And is this imperfection more pleasurable to some people than a perfect one? Etc). I don't own any Vinyl nor am I a big Vinyl aficionado, but there's undeniably a colorization when listening to a song in Vinyl Vs. digital, and then we get into the subjective realm of if this is "better" or "worse." PS - This is true all across the audio reproduction realm. For example horn Vs. reference-style speakers, horns also heavily colorize and are quite popular (particularly for Home Theater), but are also divisive because it is objectively "worse" (but subjectively "better" for some).
  - mtts 6y ago
    One other reason why vinyl sounds better is that how it’s mastered. For streaming, tracks are optimized for low quality headphones and phone speakers. Loudness is all that is required. Mastering for vinyl, however, takes effort. Do it wrong and the record becomes unplayable. So when you have to put in the effort anyway, might as well make it sound good at the same time. A/B some tracks some time. Chances are the vinyl version sounds more polished with a bit more dynamics instead of having everything slam into a limiter. This has nothing to do with sound coloring or “warmth”.
    - Baeocystin 6y ago
      To add on to above, the Wikipedia article on the Loudness War is an interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
      - tuatoru 6y ago
        Yeah, the Loudness War is why (new pressings from) old 1970s and 1980s masters sound better to many people. (Me included.) To add to the differences, technological limitations of vinyl (inability to handle heavy bass) possibly affected the music that was made and published. Maybe it had to be more melodic, or something.
- edent 6y ago
  As a newbie to vinyl, I had no idea about tone arms. Part of my intention with this was to replace all the guts with a Raspberry Pi and control things like the arm digitally. As for the wear on the vinyl - there are quite a few original pressings of Sgt Pepper. I don't mind scratching this one to hell and back!
Marazan 6y ago
You can definetly hear it is pitched up.
- edent 6y ago
  That's so interesting. I was thinking about comparing the length of tracks with the CD. Or using OpenCV to count the RPM. I had no idea people could hear subtle pitch changes like that.
  - oriolid 6y ago
    It's almost a semitone off, which means one key on a piano keyboard. People do hear that.
  - Marazan 6y ago
    It's more obvious on the second clip to me but both sound clearly off to my ear.
    - stordoff 6y ago
      Vocal made it more immediately obvious, but both was fairly noticeable to me (though I'm not sure how much I would have noticed the first one if it wasn't such a well known piece).
  - rglullis 6y ago
    Oh, one can clearly hear that is off-pitch. It's not some skill or talent that people are born though, it definitely can be trained. I was going to recommend you to look into the Philips Golden Ears Challenge, but it seems that they shamefully took it down. It was this website that went at lengths to show you different aspects of sound reproduction and you could make a ton of different A/B tests for things like coloring, compression artifacts, sound stage and tonality. When I finished it, I worried for a while this was going to ruin music for me and that I would become some kind of audiophile snob. Turns out the opposite happened. The ear training was very helpful to learn to separate the "good enough" from the "great" and the "great" from the "good-but-overpriced-audiophile-bait". I could get the $1000+ gear from a colleague who loved to spend money on audio stuff, give him an honest assessment about it and still go back contently to my $70 headphones, playing on my DIY amp and sourced from a $5 USB board...
jhallenworld 6y ago
The pot is probably for adjusting the motor speed. This is VR151 on the circuit board.
- edent 6y ago
  Thanks. I'm new to electronic circuits. Could I replace the pot with something digitally controlled? My eventual plan is to replace the main board with an SBC.
  - jhallenworld 6y ago
    You could try replacing the pot with this board: https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/ds3502-i2c-potentiometer.pdf https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/ds3502-i2c-pote... I pick this one because it has a good guide to go with it... but this digital pot is a different value. It's 10K ohms, and the one on the board is 2K ohms. Even so, it might work (it depends on the circuit). You need to remove the pot, and connect the RL, RW, and RH pins from the board to the pot pins.
  - smogcutter 6y ago
    I’m having a hard time imagining a reason that pot would need to be digitally controlled. It would be set at the factory and isn’t meant to be adjusted during use. It looks like its role is to be tuned to account for resistor tolerance in the motor’s circuit—-otherwise each board would have a slightly different current going to the motor, and different speed. If the goal is to switch between 33 and 45 digitally, then I figure you’re better off finding that switch on the circuit board and replacing it with a relay or something.
    - compiler-guy 6y ago
      High quality turntables have a speed control and dots with strobes on the side of the platter for you to get the speed exactly right. So a non adjustable resister here is a sign of lower quality. Making it digital would be great to get the pitch exactly right.
oriolid 6y ago
I don't get the reasoning that because the cheapest possible vinyl player sounds horrible, all vinyl players sound horrible. It really goes the other way: vinyl record is a medium that depends on fine mechanics and amplification for very low signal levels to work, so it just takes a bit of money to build a decent record player and preamp. Because of the vinyl boom of last 10 years or so, the current record players may be better and more affordable than ever, but this one is just sub par.
- sydd 6y ago
  That's not the reasoning. He mentions at least one thing: Vinyl records sping with the same speed for the whole record, so the audio quality gets worse toward the end. This is not the case with digital recordings.
  - tuatoru 6y ago
    Some things he doesn't mention - Because of the pivoting nature of the playback tonearm, you get a minimum of 2.5 degrees tracking error on the inner grooves as well. This causes some distortion. - The very best playback cartridges have intrinsic total harmonic distortion figures up around 0.5%, which is second-worst in the audio chain, only exceeded by speakers (typically 1%-3% for good quality speakers). Mechanically induced distortion is mainly second harmonic, though, and is less grating than odd-harmonic distortion, as you get with electrical clipping and DAC artefacts.
    - oriolid 6y ago
      Yes, those things are true. They do set limits on accurately vinyl record player can reproduce the original signal, but they certainly do not mean that all record players are as bad as this one.
notmyfriend 6y ago
If price is no object you an always get a ELP LT-1LRC that uses a laser to read the vinyl disk.
- encom 6y ago
  The problem with that (I've heard), is that it also "reads" all the dirt in the groove, that a stylus usually pushes out of the way.
encom 6y ago
Don't buy a new record player. I just bought a used Technics SL2000 for ~120€. Maybe you've heard of the Technics 1200, which is quite famous. The 2000 is a cheaper model in that series. It's from the late 70's, but unlike me it still works perfectly. 120€ is triple the cost of what OP paid, but you get a TT that's actually more than a gimmick. And you also get a far better product than what you could buy new at the same price. There's a lot of audiophile insanity in this field, and trying to find actual concrete information about pickups and turntables is made difficult by the amount of nonsense you have to wade through. But I think the appeal of records and turntables, is something similar to retro computing. It's slow and impractical, and it can be expensive, but the act of putting on a record and listening to a whole album, is just a different experience that streaming cannot replicate. Just don't go full hipster about it.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  Genuine SL1200s go for a lot of money these days. but Technics's patents expired a few years ago (2008?) so there are a lot of knockoffs now. Nearly all TTs are made in one factory on the east coast of China. IIRC the company is called something like Han Pin. (I have a Reloop. I love the auto braking.) I'd say get a good quality TT aimed at DJs, rather than some "audiophile" TT with a platter "handcrafted by Tibetan monks from organic yak leather", and all the rest.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  I inherited many 78 rpm records from my great-grandparents by way of my deceased grandparents and deceased parents. They are from the 1920s-1940s. I've spent countless hours trying to find the right turntable to buy and then the right cartridge (people say the groove widths were different in the 1920s or 30s so i need special stylus with those records but not the ones from the 40s...maybe?). It's maddening... i just want to listen to what my great-grandparents listened to without damaging the media... but it seems to take weeks of research because there are thousands of opinions. p.s. i never met my great-grandparents and thought this would be a cool way to get to know them.
  - encom 6y ago
Bud 6y ago
The author's bashing of "original" 1960s turntables is, of course, unwarranted. A lot of those turntables were, and still are, quite good.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  "A lot" is overstating things. (I was there.) The ones from then that are still around these days ... some of them can be OK, if properly reconditioned.
userbinator 6y ago
IC2 is not populated but the pinout looks like an I2C EEPROM, so it could be used for storing settings. The pinout of the main IC doesn't match a PCM2902E, and in any case that doesn't have an EEPROM function. The ratio between the motor and turntable is likely 34:1, as that gives some reasonable speeds... 1130 / 34 = 33.24 1520 / 34 = 44.71 2360 / 34 = 69.41 ...except for the last one which is presumably for 78 but quite a bit below.
bartread 6y ago
The tone of this article is incredibly obnoxious. This would be slightly (but only slightly) easier to swallow if I wasn't nursing doubts throughout about the author's knowledgeability. For example: > Early Beatles music was specifically mastered to sound good on crackly AM radios and craptacular Dansette record players. I have news for you: vast swathes of popular music are specifically mastered to sound good on low end equipment. That's as true today as it was in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and noughties. As an example, Michael Jackson's Thriller, along with plenty of other albums in the late 70s and 80s, was mastered using Auratone 5C Super Sound Cubes. These sound absolutely awful, but they give you useful information about what your mix is going to sound like on low-end equipment. A modern equivalent would be something like the Avantone MixCube, which I highly rate even though it also sounds horrendous. If your music only sounds good on audiophile level equipment, that's obviously fine, but you have to be realistic about how that's going to limit your potential market. Similarly, the digs at vintage turntables also smack of ignorance. Again, most "hi-fi" equipment throughout the decades has sat at the low end of the quality spectrum because that's where the biggest market is. Most people are perfectly happy with sound systems that have passable playback quality, which is absolutely fine. However, certainly since the late 1960s, it's been possible to buy higher end equipment if you crave better sound quality. And, on that note, as others have done I would also highly recommend picking up used hi-fi equipment rather than new. There are some real bargains to be had and it's relatively straightforward to build a great sounding system without breaking the bank. It's also quite fun and rewarding. (Finally, on sound quality, whilst CD is objectively better than vinyl, and has for example significantly higher dynamic range, it is quite possible for a vinyl recording to sound better than a CD. An example of where this might be the case is for albums that were remastered for CD during the loudness war era, which can introduce serious clipping issues[0] and significantly reduce the dynamic range of the CD master relative to the vinyl original. In this kind of situation - and, of course, it does depend on having at least half decent gear - it's entirely possible for the vinyl version to sound better than the CD remaster, even though CD as a format is capable of noticeably higher quality and greater dynamic range than vinyl.) [0] This often results in harsh sounding recordings that are quite tiring to listen to, particularly at higher volumes. If you have the option of patching a graphic equalizer into your signal path you can use it to somewhat take the edge off recordings like this, although it's obviously not ideal. I generally prefer listening with EQ bypassed but sometimes I find I have to use it. You can also use EQ to compensate for a less than ideal listening environment.
myrandomcomment 6y ago
Vinyl is not "better". It just sounds different than digital playback. Some people like the characteristic of the sound output of vinyl better. It can be mostly described at "warmer" or "has more colour". Others really enjoy the physical nature of a record. I have both a large collection of ripped CDs to lossless format and vinyl records. I can tell the difference between the same album played on each medium. In both cases the music is being played to the same set of speakers via the same tube amp. Is one better than the other? That is down to what you like! Would say for most rock/pop/metal it does not matter. For classical/jazz/opera I prefer the sound of the vinyl. One issue that others have pointed out is that how you master counts for a ton of how the music sounds. Unfortunely you can mess with the music more on the digital medium (there was for a long time a race to loudness and compression) which made things sound just freaking bad on mid-range setup. It was okay in headphones, but on any decent system it would sound like crap. The last few Metallica albums were like this. At the end if you do like to listen to vinyl do NOT use a cheap player like this. Playing is physical motion and the tracking weight of the tone arm being high will destroy your vinyl. There are tons of audiophile sites out there and some (most?) of the information you need to apply a reality filter to, but some of the reviews are pretty good. If you are looking for a good mid-range starter record player I recommend you look at the stuff from Rega. You can get a good very simple player for <$500 (I did not say cheap).
- Taniwha 6y ago
  Exactly - the same can can be said for tube amps, they're not perfect, they distort, but in a way that people like
  - myrandomcomment 6y ago
    100%. I have had a few. It was really interesting to just swap tube sets and see how it changed the sound.
WalterBright 6y ago
I bought a cheap record player to play with, and put a decent cartridge in it. The main problem was it turned too slowly. Drilling a hole in the bottom exposed the potentiometer that controlled the speed. The problem was determining its speed. I finally figured out a no-buck solution. I wanted to tune it to 33 1/3 rpm. So I taped a piece of paper to the turntable that would thwack against the tonearm pivot on each revolution, then counted the thwacks in a minute, and adjusted for 33 and a bit. Worked fine! P.S. attempting to count the revolutions by watching it spin is an exercise in madness.
- userbinator 6y ago
  To get exactly 33 1/3, wait for 3 minutes and observe that it makes 100 revolutions exactly.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    Perhaps you don't realize how boring it is to count for 3 minutes! I tried timing a single revolution with a stopwatch, but my old man reflexes made that too inaccurate to be useful.
- cardiffspaceman 6y ago
  Lots of turntables in the 80's had flickering lights lighting a pattern of dots on the edge of the turntable. The pattern would stand still if the turntable was revolving at the right speed. My Technics had a pattern for 33 1/3 and for 45. Is this something you could try?
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    You can buy a "record" with those dots on it, but then you'll also need a neon bulb connected to 60 Hz power to flicker at the right speed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 6y ago

83 points by edent 6y ago

I'm a pretty casual vinyl listener (mostly got into it since I like having a physical representation of the music I love, and to reclaim some sense of ownership in a world defined by Spotify and Apple Music). I enjoyed this post, and more or less agree with the author's opinion that claims of superior vinyl audio quality are bunk - and particularly meaningless in a world where most new music is recorded or produced digitally in the first place. That said, I probably still would avoid a cheapo player like this that does not have an adjustable tone arm. For one, it's more likely to have issues skipping when you can't adjust it properly. The second concern - which I'll admit I have no data to back up, and since this is an opinion from the audiophile community, may warrant some skepticism - is that cheap players with unbalanced tone arms are infamous for supposedly wearing down records more quickly over time by applying too much pressure. The author's note about the stereo output being unbalanced, by the way, is a relatively common side effect of an unbalanced tone arm (though there's various other reasons it can occur).

swimfar 6y ago
Even a lot of relatively cheap record players have adjutable tonearm weights. But it's not just the vertical needle force that wears out the records. The other issue is lack of adjustable (or any) anti-skate force. This keeps the needle from being forced to one side of the groove. I stumbled across the article recently where someone set up an A/B test to try to observe record damage from these cheap turntables. While there are some limitations of the experiment, I thought it was a good idea. There are too many "facts" that are just accepted as true without any emperical observation (not just in the audio community). https://www.audioappraisal.com/will-a-cheap-turntable-damage-your-records/ https://www.audioappraisal.com/will-a-cheap-turntable-damage...
- avolcano 6y ago
  Yeah, I didn't mean to imply you had to break the bank to avoid damaging your records. And good note on the anti-skate tracking as well!
techsupporter 6y ago
> I enjoyed this post, and more or less agree with the author's opinion that claims of superior vinyl audio quality are bunk - and particularly meaningless in a world where most new music is recorded or produced digitally in the first place. Exactly, at least for me as well. Perhaps older music, mastered in analog and later put out for radio airplay (or converted to digital) by slamming all of the levels as high as they'd go, sounds better on vinyl insofar as vinyl is as close to "original" as you're going to get. The "loudness war" is a thing, for sure. But for me, it's a hobby, and hobbies need not be completely efficient. I like fiddling with my mid-range record player, digging for albums I like, finding the one copy of a Broadway soundtrack of a wildly popular band's album that got made once and wasn't very popular[0], and just watching the record go round while I listen with decent headphones. And, especially, reading articles like this that take a lighthearted view of taking apart a piece of kit. 0 - "American Idiot, the Musical"
Someone1234 6y ago
There's two different arguments being conflated: - Vinyl is higher fidelity (yourself, and the article). - Vinyl sounds better. Vinyl colors sound, in the same way that some Vacuum Tubes color sound, which is a roundabout way of saying: They objectively make it less similar to the reference material than straight digital. But even though Vinyl is objectively worse at reproduction, some people prefer it (i.e. it subjectively sounds better to them). Why might that be? And that question itself is when you go down a rabbit hole (e.g. Does playing a Vinyl album twice ever sound identical? And is this imperfection more pleasurable to some people than a perfect one? Etc). I don't own any Vinyl nor am I a big Vinyl aficionado, but there's undeniably a colorization when listening to a song in Vinyl Vs. digital, and then we get into the subjective realm of if this is "better" or "worse." PS - This is true all across the audio reproduction realm. For example horn Vs. reference-style speakers, horns also heavily colorize and are quite popular (particularly for Home Theater), but are also divisive because it is objectively "worse" (but subjectively "better" for some).
- mtts 6y ago
  One other reason why vinyl sounds better is that how it’s mastered. For streaming, tracks are optimized for low quality headphones and phone speakers. Loudness is all that is required. Mastering for vinyl, however, takes effort. Do it wrong and the record becomes unplayable. So when you have to put in the effort anyway, might as well make it sound good at the same time. A/B some tracks some time. Chances are the vinyl version sounds more polished with a bit more dynamics instead of having everything slam into a limiter. This has nothing to do with sound coloring or “warmth”.
  - Baeocystin 6y ago
    To add on to above, the Wikipedia article on the Loudness War is an interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
    - tuatoru 6y ago
      Yeah, the Loudness War is why (new pressings from) old 1970s and 1980s masters sound better to many people. (Me included.) To add to the differences, technological limitations of vinyl (inability to handle heavy bass) possibly affected the music that was made and published. Maybe it had to be more melodic, or something.
edent 6y ago
As a newbie to vinyl, I had no idea about tone arms. Part of my intention with this was to replace all the guts with a Raspberry Pi and control things like the arm digitally. As for the wear on the vinyl - there are quite a few original pressings of Sgt Pepper. I don't mind scratching this one to hell and back!

Marazan 6y ago

You can definetly hear it is pitched up.

edent 6y ago
That's so interesting. I was thinking about comparing the length of tracks with the CD. Or using OpenCV to count the RPM. I had no idea people could hear subtle pitch changes like that.
- oriolid 6y ago
  It's almost a semitone off, which means one key on a piano keyboard. People do hear that.
- Marazan 6y ago
  It's more obvious on the second clip to me but both sound clearly off to my ear.
  - stordoff 6y ago
    Vocal made it more immediately obvious, but both was fairly noticeable to me (though I'm not sure how much I would have noticed the first one if it wasn't such a well known piece).
- rglullis 6y ago
  Oh, one can clearly hear that is off-pitch. It's not some skill or talent that people are born though, it definitely can be trained. I was going to recommend you to look into the Philips Golden Ears Challenge, but it seems that they shamefully took it down. It was this website that went at lengths to show you different aspects of sound reproduction and you could make a ton of different A/B tests for things like coloring, compression artifacts, sound stage and tonality. When I finished it, I worried for a while this was going to ruin music for me and that I would become some kind of audiophile snob. Turns out the opposite happened. The ear training was very helpful to learn to separate the "good enough" from the "great" and the "great" from the "good-but-overpriced-audiophile-bait". I could get the $1000+ gear from a colleague who loved to spend money on audio stuff, give him an honest assessment about it and still go back contently to my $70 headphones, playing on my DIY amp and sourced from a $5 USB board...

jhallenworld 6y ago

The pot is probably for adjusting the motor speed. This is VR151 on the circuit board.

edent 6y ago
Thanks. I'm new to electronic circuits. Could I replace the pot with something digitally controlled? My eventual plan is to replace the main board with an SBC.
- jhallenworld 6y ago
  You could try replacing the pot with this board: https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/ds3502-i2c-potentiometer.pdf https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/ds3502-i2c-pote... I pick this one because it has a good guide to go with it... but this digital pot is a different value. It's 10K ohms, and the one on the board is 2K ohms. Even so, it might work (it depends on the circuit). You need to remove the pot, and connect the RL, RW, and RH pins from the board to the pot pins.
- smogcutter 6y ago
  I’m having a hard time imagining a reason that pot would need to be digitally controlled. It would be set at the factory and isn’t meant to be adjusted during use. It looks like its role is to be tuned to account for resistor tolerance in the motor’s circuit—-otherwise each board would have a slightly different current going to the motor, and different speed. If the goal is to switch between 33 and 45 digitally, then I figure you’re better off finding that switch on the circuit board and replacing it with a relay or something.
  - compiler-guy 6y ago
    High quality turntables have a speed control and dots with strobes on the side of the platter for you to get the speed exactly right. So a non adjustable resister here is a sign of lower quality. Making it digital would be great to get the pitch exactly right.

oriolid 6y ago

I don't get the reasoning that because the cheapest possible vinyl player sounds horrible, all vinyl players sound horrible. It really goes the other way: vinyl record is a medium that depends on fine mechanics and amplification for very low signal levels to work, so it just takes a bit of money to build a decent record player and preamp. Because of the vinyl boom of last 10 years or so, the current record players may be better and more affordable than ever, but this one is just sub par.

sydd 6y ago
That's not the reasoning. He mentions at least one thing: Vinyl records sping with the same speed for the whole record, so the audio quality gets worse toward the end. This is not the case with digital recordings.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  Some things he doesn't mention - Because of the pivoting nature of the playback tonearm, you get a minimum of 2.5 degrees tracking error on the inner grooves as well. This causes some distortion. - The very best playback cartridges have intrinsic total harmonic distortion figures up around 0.5%, which is second-worst in the audio chain, only exceeded by speakers (typically 1%-3% for good quality speakers). Mechanically induced distortion is mainly second harmonic, though, and is less grating than odd-harmonic distortion, as you get with electrical clipping and DAC artefacts.
  - oriolid 6y ago
    Yes, those things are true. They do set limits on accurately vinyl record player can reproduce the original signal, but they certainly do not mean that all record players are as bad as this one.

notmyfriend 6y ago

If price is no object you an always get a ELP LT-1LRC that uses a laser to read the vinyl disk.

encom 6y ago
The problem with that (I've heard), is that it also "reads" all the dirt in the groove, that a stylus usually pushes out of the way.

encom 6y ago

Don't buy a new record player. I just bought a used Technics SL2000 for ~120€. Maybe you've heard of the Technics 1200, which is quite famous. The 2000 is a cheaper model in that series. It's from the late 70's, but unlike me it still works perfectly. 120€ is triple the cost of what OP paid, but you get a TT that's actually more than a gimmick. And you also get a far better product than what you could buy new at the same price. There's a lot of audiophile insanity in this field, and trying to find actual concrete information about pickups and turntables is made difficult by the amount of nonsense you have to wade through. But I think the appeal of records and turntables, is something similar to retro computing. It's slow and impractical, and it can be expensive, but the act of putting on a record and listening to a whole album, is just a different experience that streaming cannot replicate. Just don't go full hipster about it.

tuatoru 6y ago
Genuine SL1200s go for a lot of money these days. but Technics's patents expired a few years ago (2008?) so there are a lot of knockoffs now. Nearly all TTs are made in one factory on the east coast of China. IIRC the company is called something like Han Pin. (I have a Reloop. I love the auto braking.) I'd say get a good quality TT aimed at DJs, rather than some "audiophile" TT with a platter "handcrafted by Tibetan monks from organic yak leather", and all the rest.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
I inherited many 78 rpm records from my great-grandparents by way of my deceased grandparents and deceased parents. They are from the 1920s-1940s. I've spent countless hours trying to find the right turntable to buy and then the right cartridge (people say the groove widths were different in the 1920s or 30s so i need special stylus with those records but not the ones from the 40s...maybe?). It's maddening... i just want to listen to what my great-grandparents listened to without damaging the media... but it seems to take weeks of research because there are thousands of opinions. p.s. i never met my great-grandparents and thought this would be a cool way to get to know them.
- encom 6y ago

Bud 6y ago

The author's bashing of "original" 1960s turntables is, of course, unwarranted. A lot of those turntables were, and still are, quite good.

tuatoru 6y ago
"A lot" is overstating things. (I was there.) The ones from then that are still around these days ... some of them can be OK, if properly reconditioned.

userbinator 6y ago

IC2 is not populated but the pinout looks like an I2C EEPROM, so it could be used for storing settings. The pinout of the main IC doesn't match a PCM2902E, and in any case that doesn't have an EEPROM function. The ratio between the motor and turntable is likely 34:1, as that gives some reasonable speeds... 1130 / 34 = 33.24 1520 / 34 = 44.71 2360 / 34 = 69.41 ...except for the last one which is presumably for 78 but quite a bit below.

bartread 6y ago

The tone of this article is incredibly obnoxious. This would be slightly (but only slightly) easier to swallow if I wasn't nursing doubts throughout about the author's knowledgeability. For example: > Early Beatles music was specifically mastered to sound good on crackly AM radios and craptacular Dansette record players. I have news for you: vast swathes of popular music are specifically mastered to sound good on low end equipment. That's as true today as it was in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and noughties. As an example, Michael Jackson's Thriller, along with plenty of other albums in the late 70s and 80s, was mastered using Auratone 5C Super Sound Cubes. These sound absolutely awful, but they give you useful information about what your mix is going to sound like on low-end equipment. A modern equivalent would be something like the Avantone MixCube, which I highly rate even though it also sounds horrendous. If your music only sounds good on audiophile level equipment, that's obviously fine, but you have to be realistic about how that's going to limit your potential market. Similarly, the digs at vintage turntables also smack of ignorance. Again, most "hi-fi" equipment throughout the decades has sat at the low end of the quality spectrum because that's where the biggest market is. Most people are perfectly happy with sound systems that have passable playback quality, which is absolutely fine. However, certainly since the late 1960s, it's been possible to buy higher end equipment if you crave better sound quality. And, on that note, as others have done I would also highly recommend picking up used hi-fi equipment rather than new. There are some real bargains to be had and it's relatively straightforward to build a great sounding system without breaking the bank. It's also quite fun and rewarding. (Finally, on sound quality, whilst CD is objectively better than vinyl, and has for example significantly higher dynamic range, it is quite possible for a vinyl recording to sound better than a CD. An example of where this might be the case is for albums that were remastered for CD during the loudness war era, which can introduce serious clipping issues[0] and significantly reduce the dynamic range of the CD master relative to the vinyl original. In this kind of situation - and, of course, it does depend on having at least half decent gear - it's entirely possible for the vinyl version to sound better than the CD remaster, even though CD as a format is capable of noticeably higher quality and greater dynamic range than vinyl.) [0] This often results in harsh sounding recordings that are quite tiring to listen to, particularly at higher volumes. If you have the option of patching a graphic equalizer into your signal path you can use it to somewhat take the edge off recordings like this, although it's obviously not ideal. I generally prefer listening with EQ bypassed but sometimes I find I have to use it. You can also use EQ to compensate for a less than ideal listening environment.

myrandomcomment 6y ago

Vinyl is not "better". It just sounds different than digital playback. Some people like the characteristic of the sound output of vinyl better. It can be mostly described at "warmer" or "has more colour". Others really enjoy the physical nature of a record. I have both a large collection of ripped CDs to lossless format and vinyl records. I can tell the difference between the same album played on each medium. In both cases the music is being played to the same set of speakers via the same tube amp. Is one better than the other? That is down to what you like! Would say for most rock/pop/metal it does not matter. For classical/jazz/opera I prefer the sound of the vinyl. One issue that others have pointed out is that how you master counts for a ton of how the music sounds. Unfortunely you can mess with the music more on the digital medium (there was for a long time a race to loudness and compression) which made things sound just freaking bad on mid-range setup. It was okay in headphones, but on any decent system it would sound like crap. The last few Metallica albums were like this. At the end if you do like to listen to vinyl do NOT use a cheap player like this. Playing is physical motion and the tracking weight of the tone arm being high will destroy your vinyl. There are tons of audiophile sites out there and some (most?) of the information you need to apply a reality filter to, but some of the reviews are pretty good. If you are looking for a good mid-range starter record player I recommend you look at the stuff from Rega. You can get a good very simple player for <$500 (I did not say cheap).

Taniwha 6y ago
Exactly - the same can can be said for tube amps, they're not perfect, they distort, but in a way that people like
- myrandomcomment 6y ago
  100%. I have had a few. It was really interesting to just swap tube sets and see how it changed the sound.

WalterBright 6y ago

I bought a cheap record player to play with, and put a decent cartridge in it. The main problem was it turned too slowly. Drilling a hole in the bottom exposed the potentiometer that controlled the speed. The problem was determining its speed. I finally figured out a no-buck solution. I wanted to tune it to 33 1/3 rpm. So I taped a piece of paper to the turntable that would thwack against the tonearm pivot on each revolution, then counted the thwacks in a minute, and adjusted for 33 and a bit. Worked fine! P.S. attempting to count the revolutions by watching it spin is an exercise in madness.

userbinator 6y ago
To get exactly 33 1/3, wait for 3 minutes and observe that it makes 100 revolutions exactly.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Perhaps you don't realize how boring it is to count for 3 minutes! I tried timing a single revolution with a stopwatch, but my old man reflexes made that too inaccurate to be useful.
cardiffspaceman 6y ago
Lots of turntables in the 80's had flickering lights lighting a pattern of dots on the edge of the turntable. The pattern would stand still if the turntable was revolving at the right speed. My Technics had a pattern for 33 1/3 and for 45. Is this something you could try?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  You can buy a "record" with those dots on it, but then you'll also need a neon bulb connected to 60 Hz power to flicker at the right speed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
6y ago