I am not sure if this is the right place, but it is home entertainment.

I want to go back to vinyls for some of my music listening, so I am looking at a semi decent amp and record deck, but not wanting to spend a fortune. My nephew who is into this sort of thing recommends looking at ebay for something like a Rotel Amp, i must admit I did have one years ago and it was great quality.
But i am also looking at Cambridge audio amps, never heard one in use, but they seem to get good reviews.


The record deck I am looking at is maybe one of the Pro-ject turntables, like this one. As I said i do not want to spend a fortune.

I did look at one of the minimal decks, just a turntable, like this, while it looks good, i think it would collect dist pretty quick.


I have some tannoy spekers, I got to look at the max they can take mind you, but since I do not want anything powerful, they should be ok for my use. I suppose I will need a Cd player at some point, but not too bothered about that as I can stick the PS3 sound into the amp and use that.

Anyway, what do people recomend? I do not mind going to about £400 in total


I have got a record deck, it is on my old toshiba midi unit, but it was not the best deck in it's day and the belt seems to be slipping now, getting a new belt may be impossible.

Thanks

Not sure if any of the Cambridge amps have a phono pre-amp stage built in. Which would mean having another box to perform that function.

This Pioneer however does have a phono stage

http://www.richersounds.com/product/...0/pion-a10-blk

Should be OK with the Pro-Ject turntable.

Have a look on ebay, you can pick up B&O setups well within your budget.

But B&O isn't terribly good gear, more an over priced fashion statement than anything else (bit like Bose ).

Agreed, style over function in most cases. And a "designer" price tag to match. From what I've seen and heard of B&O kit you can get a far better system for half the money. Unless you value visual style over sound quality that is

Thanks, but never thought much about B&O, over priced and way over the top on the low end sound wise and no matter what you did with it, it still sounded the same.

I know someone who had one a few years back, brand new it was and he said it was the worse system he have had in 30 years.

thanks anyway.

One of the more expensive Cambridge got a phono input, the one thing I am not fond of on the cambridge units is the menu, that is the only way to change the bass and treble, ok once they are set there is very little need to change them.


The one thing I have noticed about the record deck is no switch to change from 45 to 33, the only way is to take platter off and move the belt on the motor, never seen that before.

i suppose it is not too bad if playing a load of singles at a time.

My brother-in-law have a project turntable, but I never noticed if it had a switch for speed or not, I will have to ask him.

Looks like i will have to have more of a think, ut I want to try and get it sorted before Christmas.
I got 3 months of work, so plenty of time I suppose.

On the Pro-Ject Essential 2 the belt runs round the outside of the platter. The motor is in the back left corner of the deck so you can move the belt between the steps on the pulley without removing the platter. On the Debut model you do ahve to remove the platter.

Though you can get what Pro-Ject call the Speed Box to change speed electronically

http://www.project-audio.com/main.ph...eedbox&lang=en

somehow I was looking at the wrong deck, you are right the Essential 2 the belt is on the outside, it was the Debut I was looking at for some reason. It is the Essential 2 I am thinking of getting, I think it is the older version my brother in law got and it sounds really good, but then he gone a bit over the top with the amps.



Oh I see, I doubt I will bother with that to be honest.

the first new vinyl I will buy is Pink floyd, Dark side of the moon. My brother in law got it and I could not believe how heavy they are these days, the quality of the press is far above what it used to be.

Vinyl. No "s".

I suspect that, like me, you're neither young nor American, so you have absolutely no excuse.


I would buy a second hand turntable and a new cartridge. I would buy whatever amplifier I wanted (again, second hand integrated amplifiers can be a great buy), and add an external phono stage if needed.

Then again, I see vinyl as a secondary fun source of some music, and lossless digital files as a primary source for almost everything. This hipster idea that vinyl is better than CD is laughable (unless the CD is poorly mastered, which most new releases are; lots of new vinyl is no better though).

Cheers,
David.

P.S. of course you want a deck with a normal speed change. This flipping the belt nonsense is just to feed the audiophile fantasy that it must be better because it's harder work. I speak as someone with a deck that is even more awkward. It's just a nuisance - plus, while you should only be handling records with clean hands, you don't want any dirt or grease at all on the drive belt. It's a stupid idea.

I know, but I must have pressed the s key by accident.


I am looking at that as well, maybe a Rotel amp as they was pretty good, not sure about a external phono stage, I have seen some of them in action and most seems to have a problem with hum and takes some sorting out


I have to disagree with you there, vinyl got a warmer sound, why do think they try to copy it with digital audio? older music which is what I like sound far better on Vinyl than CD.
If vinyl is not better than Cd, then tell me why it is coming back?




Audiophile fantasy? I do not think so, the reason why the turntable is built that way is to keep costs down and to put the money into the tone arm, cartridge and motor.

Nostalgia - CD far exceeds the quality of vinyl.

The 'warmness' you refer to is a lack of quality on vinyl, unable to reproduce higher frequencies (and getting less every time you play a record).

As for 'coming back' there's a small number of people buying a small number of records, only significant in that it's higher than it was at one time.

It's more down to the even harmonic distortion produced from vinyl that a lot of people like. With modern DSP it would be easy to add a "vinyl mode" to a CD player or amp to put in similar distortion to a CD to make it sound like vinyl but then you could never add the nostalgia back.

Denon do some very good kit as well. Their PMA-250SE was considered one of the best of it's kind when new. Had one myself until I had to remove it to free up space for my surround sound receiver

Their modern equivalents are also pretty decent. For example

http://www.richersounds.com/product/...ae/deno-pma520

Has a phono pre-amp built in.


Vinyl is not better than CD, merely different. A properly made digital copy of a master tape is pretty much indistinguishable from the original.

And yes I have made both analogue and digital recordings of a wide variety of music from Classical to hard rock often running both formats at the same time off the same mixing desk. The major difference between the analogue version and the digital version is the very much lower noise floor of the digital version.

Vinyl may produce a sound you and many others like but it is not an accurate copy of the original master tape no matter how well mastered simply because of the limitations of the medium. Properly mastered a CD can be very much closer to the master. The key words here of course being "properly mastered". It is quite easy to knacker the sound of a CD by poor mastering, as it is to knacker a vinyl copy.

It is simply a matter of taste that some prefer the vinyl sound to CD. But it would be wrong to suggest that it is intrinsically better than CD. Or for that matter that CD is intrinsically better than vinyl. It's a bit like saying red is better than green. Vinyl sound is simply different to CD sound. Some prefer it others don't, neither is right, neither is wrong.

Now if we were talking about those abominations that are low bitrate mp3s that is a different matter. How anyone can listen to that rubbish is beyond me. But then again the vast majority of the public in my experience wouldn't know a good sounding audio system if it jumped up and bit them on the backside

noise747,

If you have near-mint vinyl, a decent turntable set-up, and a CD with the same mastering, it's rather hard to tell the difference between vinyl and CD while a typical pop track is playing. It's kind of obvious when the tracks ends, or with dynamic classical music, or when the record is worn/damaged, or if the turntable or cartridge or stylus isn't very good.

You are free to believe whatever marketing tales and audiophile myths you want to. I'm not trying to be horrible. I have a pretty decent vinyl set-up.


There are many many different versions of Dark Side of the Moon available, across vinyl, CD, SACD, cassette, 8-track - including stereo, quad, and 5.1 mixes. There are several different vinyl and CD versions. They do sound different.
http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/ind...6&#entry749816
The SACD (but not the CD part of it) is supposed to sound good.

As is often the case with pop music, it is the mastering, not the medium, which accounts for the real sound quality differences. Listeners are free to imagine others if they wish, or scratch/wear their records and/or stylus to introduce easily audible differences in sound (pops, clicks, hiss, distortion, ...).

Cheers,
David.

I think this is a contradiction. If the aim is to hear something as close to the master tape as possible, CD is better than vinyl - you just said so

It's only in the world of "I've got used to the faults of vinyl - I like them - I don't want to hear something closer to the master tape or something that's closer to the original sound" that vinyl can compete.

FWIW back when I used to listen to far more vinyl, I was far more tolerant of its faults. I haven't listened to vinyl much for about five years, and going back to it, I find the clicks and distortion far more annoying than I used to. This is even true for some digital recordings of vinyl, which are the exact same digital recordings I listened to before, so the sound itself hasn't changed at all - my expectations have.

Cheers,
David.

The Cambridge Topaz A10 has a phono stage input, last time I looked it's about £170. Other posible contenders in that sort of price range are Denon, Marantz and Yamaha amps. If you want Rotel you'll have to go for second hand at that price.

The Pro-Ject turntable at around £160 is considered to be the best around in its price range.

At least with vinyl you can actually read the sleeve notes without the aid of a magnifying glass

Sometimes - sometimes LP sleeve notes are just as small.

Audio geek that I am, the only ones I ever found interesting were the ones on the inner sleeves of LPs from the 1960s telling you how the magnificent new stereo recordings were made.

The ones where each band member thanks everyone from their manager to their cat seem like a waste of ink to me.

Cheers,
David.

Most old vinyl sounds better than the CD version because of the amount of dynamic range compression when it was remastered. Everything is wacked up to the max and it sounds dreadful

Sadly, this is often true, though the situation is worse for new music. At least for older music, there is often a decent quality CD issue from the early 1990s to be found. By that time, people realised they needed to go back to the original master tapes to make decent sounding CDs, but hadn't yet decided to over-compress them. The biggest problem to avoid from that era is aggressive noise reduction.

Not all vinyl is decent. Some pressings were/are terrible. Much new vinyl is cut from over-compressed CD masters.

Cheers,
David.

I would suggest Lidl if you wait a couple of weeks and make sure you keep checking their website, they have a turntable that can connect to an amplifier but it will record to an SD Card/Memory stick which would enable you to have the best of both worlds so that you can copy your vinyl to CD etc.

Aldi have a turntable in a week on Sunday but it is only one you can connect to the computer although I think you can connect it to an amplifier so out of the two I would wait for Lidl to have their one instock, It depends what you want but if say you have DAB radios and the like then the turntable in Lidl will be more than ideal.

Why not try looking on Lidl's website as there is a section with a Christmas catalogue where you can see what is coming in over the next few weeks with the turntable pictured as well as a description.

Good Luck!,

thanks, but I want something a little bit better than what Lidl sells. i do not think one of their £20 turntable is as good a £200 Pro-ject.
If i was going for cheap, then I may as well, just keep what I have got.

Not sure what a DAB radio have to do with a turntable to be honest, I do have a DAb radio, but it is used mainly in the bedroom and normally on FM.

Get on Ebay, some great value Rega Planar 3 on there. Best turntable i ever owned, coupled with a Denon PMA350se amp and Mission 751 speakers. Sold it all to help pay for my wedding and regretted it ever since....

If you have no interest in sound quality and don't care about the rusty nail that masquerades as a stylus on such cheap and nasty turntables ruining your record collection then a Lidl special will be ideal