Turntables & Vinyl

A turntable is the only source component that is still a mechanical instrument. Every other box in a hi-fi system moves electrons around; this one drags a diamond through a groove at a controlled angle and a controlled force, and converts the wobble into a voltage measured in thousandths of a volt. Almost everything that makes turntables confusing follows from that fact.

What you are actually buying

Four things, and they are not equally important. There is the plinth and platter, whose entire job is to stay still and turn at a constant speed. There is the motor and drive, belt or direct. There is the tonearm, which must hold the cartridge at the right angle with the right force while adding as little of its own character as possible. And there is the cartridge, which does the actual reading.

At the entry end, most of your money goes into the first two. By about $500 it starts shifting to the arm and cartridge, and above that it is almost all arm and cartridge. That is the correct progression, because the cartridge is the transducer and the transducer is where the information enters the system.

What the price brackets actually buy

Under $300 buys a competent, usually automatic deck with a built-in phono stage and a cartridge chosen to hit a price. It will play records properly at a controlled tracking force, which is the thing that separates a turntable from a toy.

$300 to $500 is where you get a choice: a better cartridge, or more convenience. The Fluance RT82 spends its budget on an Ortofon OM 10 and omits the phono stage entirely; the Audio-Technica AT-LP120XUSB spends its on direct drive, a removable headshell, USB output and 78 rpm. Neither is wrong — they are answers to different questions. Our under-$500 roundup works through both.

$500 to $1,000 is mostly cartridge. The Fluance RT85 ships with an Ortofon 2M Blue, and that cartridge is a substantial share of the price. This is also where manufacturers stop including a phono stage, on the assumption that you will bring a better one — which means the sticker price is missing $75 to $190 you still have to spend. The under-$1,000 roundup covers what each deck actually prioritises.

Above $1,000 we do not currently cover, because the decks that matter at that price — Rega, Technics — are sold through specialist dealers rather than the retailer we link to. We would rather leave a gap than write a recommendation with a buy button that cannot exist.

The two questions that catch everyone

Do you need a phono preamp?Yes — but you may already own one, hiding in the turntable, the amplifier, or the speakers. A turntable’s output is roughly a hundred times quieter than line level and has had its bass deliberately removed at the cutting stage. A phono stage fixes both. Get this wrong and you will conclude your new turntable is broken when it is simply plugged into the wrong socket. The 30-second check is here.

Will that cartridge fit this arm? This is answerable with one equation and two published numbers — arm effective mass and cartridge compliance — targeting a resonance between 8 and 12 Hz. The catch is that most manufacturers do not publish the arm figure at all. Pro-Ject does. Audio-Technica does not. Fluance publishes something under that heading whose value suggests it may be measuring something else. We show the arithmetic and the gaps.

What we would skip

Suitcase all-in-one players. Not because we have tested them — we have not — but because of what they decline to publish. Every deck we recommend states a tracking force, and most let you adjust it. Suitcase players generally publish no tracking force at all. A stylus pressed into a groove at an unspecified, unadjustable force is a risk you cannot quantify, and that absence is itself the answer.

We would also skip paying for a built-in phono stage twice. If your amplifier has a PHONO input, buying a deck whose price includes a stage you will switch off is money that could have gone into the cartridge instead.

How to read the pages below

Every specification we publish is linked to the manufacturer document we read it from. Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure — wow and flutter as a limit rather than a measurement, tonearm effective mass at all — we say so rather than estimating. We have not heard any of this gear, so you will not find a sentence about how it sounds anywhere on this hub. What you will find is the arithmetic, the sources, and the prices as of today.