The Best Turntables With a Built-In Preamp

A built-in phono preamp is the feature that lets a turntable connect to anything with a line input — powered speakers, a streaming amplifier, a receiver with no PHONO socket. Nine turntables are in our registry; six have a stage built in and are on this page, and the three that do not are listed at the end. Our phono preamp explainer covers why the stage exists; this page ranks the decks that include one, on the stage rather than on the deck.

What to look for in a built-in stage

Can it be switched off, and does the maker say how? Every deck here has a PHONO/LINE switch. What differs is what the maker claims for the PHONO position. Fluance states the RT81’s switch is a “true bypass” that takes the electronics out of circuit; Music Hall states the mmf-1.5’s stage is “bypassable”; Audio-Technica publishes “switchable PHONO/LINE” and no more. Those are three different levels of commitment, and the difference matters the day you buy an external stage from our phono preamp roundup and want the built-in one out of the signal path.

What is published about it?Audio-Technica publishes a nominal gain, 36 dB, for all three of its decks here. Fluance publishes the RT81’s signal-to-noise as 67 dB or higher A-weighted and 60 dB unweighted — the only deck here that gives you both. Music Hall publishes 65 dB DIN-B. Sony publishes nothing we can read; every Sony-hosted page and the manual returned HTTP 403. A stage with a number attached is a stage you can check.

Can the cartridge it feeds be changed?A phono stage is only as good as what it amplifies. The AT-LP120XUSB and mmf-1.5 have removable headshells; the RT81 takes a standard half-inch cartridge; the AT-LP70X’s cartridge body is non-removable by Audio-Technica’s own manual, though its stylus upgrades; the AT-LP60XBT’s AT3600L is a stylus-swap-only design. Our interchangeability guide names the two decks that cannot take a different cartridge, and both are on this page.

How the ranking works

Bypass claim first, published stage figures second, cartridge path third, then the rest of the deck. That order puts a deck with a documented true bypass above one with a bare switch, and a deck whose maker publishes nothing at the bottom regardless of how well it works. Automation, Bluetooth and USB do not move the ranking here; they decide the beginners page, which shares five decks with this one and orders them differently because it is asking a different question.

The stage with a published gain, feeding a cartridge you can replace

The Audio-Technica AT-LP120XUSB publishes a switchable PHONO/LINE stage with 36 dB nominal gain and RIAA equalization, a USB output that runs through the same stage, and an AT-VM95E cartridge on a removable AT-HS6 headshell. It ranks first because it is the only deck here where every part of the phono chain is both documented and replaceable: the gain is a number, the cartridge is a half-inch mount, and the whole VM95 stylus range drops into the same body. Its cons are a 50 dB signal-to-noise for the deck itself, lower than the Fluance and Music Hall belt drives, and a manual that says “switchable” without describing a bypass. Our full review covers the direct drive and the USB path.

The stage the maker calls a true bypass

The Fluance RT81 publishes a PHONO/LINE switch with, in Fluance’s words, a true bypass that takes the electronics out of circuit when an external stage is used, and it publishes the deck’s signal-to-noise two ways: 67 dB or higher A-weighted and 60 dB unweighted. It ships an Audio-Technica AT95E on a standard mount. It ranks second on the strength of that bypass claim — the strongest statement any maker here makes about what the switch does — and behind the LP120XUSB only because Fluance publishes no gain figure for the stage itself. Its tonearm effective mass is published as 28.2 g, which is implausibly high for an effective-mass figure and may be total arm mass; we flag it rather than use it.

Bypassable, on a deck with a removable headshell and 78 rpm

The Music Hall mmf-1.5 publishes a bypassable phono stage, a static-balanced S-shaped arm with a removable headshell, three speeds including 78, a 305 mm die-cast platter, wow and flutter below 0.1% and signal-to-noise above 65 dB DIN-B. It is the best-specified deck on this page as a turntable. It ranks third rather than higher because “bypassable” is a weaker statement than Fluance’s and because Music Hall publishes no figure for the stage, no gain and no noise; the supplied Melody cartridge is also a Music Hall part with fewer published specifications than the Audio-Technica alternatives. Its price is not always live in our price layer; the tile says “check price” when it is not.

A published 36 dB stage on a cartridge that cannot come off

The Audio-Technica AT-LP70X publishes the same switchable 36 dB stage as the LP120XUSB on a fully automatic belt drive with a 55 dB signal-to-noise figure — better than its bigger sibling. It ranks fourth because of the manual’s own statement that the AT-VM95C cartridge body is non-removable. The stylus upgrades across the VM95 range, which is a real path, but the stage will feed that cartridge body for the life of the deck. Audio-Technica publishes no tonearm effective mass or tracking force range for it.

The stage we cannot read anything about

The Sony PS-LX310BT has a built-in phono stage with a PHONO/LINE switch, Bluetooth transmission and full automation. It ranks fifth because Sony publishes nothing we can cite: sony.com, its regional sites and the operating-instructions PDF all returned HTTP 403 when we tried to read them, so there is no gain figure, no noise figure, no cartridge specification and no bypass description we can quote. A deck we cannot document ranks below decks we can, whatever it is like to own.

The simplest deck, and the one with the least to say for its stage

The Audio-Technica AT-LP60XBT publishes the same switchable 36 dB stage, a 50 dB signal-to-noise figure (DIN-B), a fully automatic belt drive and Bluetooth. Its cartridge is the AT3600L, a design where only the stylus is replaceable. It ranks last because it combines the least-documented bypass with the least upgrade path: the stage is fine, but nothing behind it can change. It is often without a live price in our price layer.

The decks that do not have one, and why that can be right

The Fluance RT82 and RT85 both state “Separate Phono Preamp Required”, and the Pro-Ject Debut Carbon EVO has no stage either. That is a deliberate choice by those makers: the money goes into the deck, and the phono stage is yours to choose, which means the gain can match the cartridge and the stage can be upgraded on its own. If your amplifier already has a PHONO input — every integrated on our turntable amplifier page does — a built-in stage is a feature you would switch off on day one, and the under-$500 roundup ranks both kinds together on the deck alone.