I am thinking I would prefer to go a bit old school with listening to music - I miss the whole feeling of physical media & picking a CD to listen to - I really struggle with having pretty much all the music ever at my finger tips.
So I am thinking it might be time to purchase a record player - the last time I was near one was my parents hifi when I was about 8 & it was 1985.
What do I need to look out for, do I need an amp or is one with built in speakers OK?
I might nip into Richer sounds to check this out https://www.richersounds.com/philips-the-tina-tav9000d-black-wood/ just don't tell anyone - not sure I can be bothered with getting separates and making space for them.
Depends what you have already and how much you want to spend. Turntables can be had cheaply secondhand to making an eMTB look cheap.
Second going in to Richersounds, they'll be able to offer something and you'll be able to listen to a few different things.
Luckily I never got rid of my old records or CD’s and still listen to them when the mood takes. I buy new vinyl rarely, maybe 2-3 times a year.
Most of my hi fi is what I bought back in the early nineties. Technics CD player, NAD amp, B&W speakers. My record deck is a Pro-Ject I bought in 2011 when my old Dual deck died.
Sort of depends how much you care about the quality of sound you get out! I'd avoid a turntable with built-in speakers like the plague, as the vibrations from the speakers are going to be transmitted directly to the tonearm through the housing.
There are plenty of budget turntables with built-in preamps and amplifiers, that you can connect to bluetooth speakers. That's probably the cheapest option. For better quality, though, get a good used turntable and amplifier; I'm assuming you already have speakers. eBay has plenty of good used gear, just make sure the amp has a phono input (i.e. has a preamp built in), as some more modern ones don't.
I bought my turntable off eBay for £30.
Is it amazing- no
Are my mum's old records from the 60'6/ 70's amazing records- probably not.
Is the newer vinyl I've bought super duper audio quality- no it's the music, not the material in interested in.
Do angels fly in my ears while listening - no. Sounds like music.
Do I think £30,000 turntables/ system will have angles flying into my ears- no
What sounded better, my band recoding our album or the CD- they sound the same to my ears.
Do I have to volume up super high- no, my wee ones room is above
Is it nice to listen to vinyl occasionally- yes
Do I get the odd complaint about how much of the living room it takes up- yes.
My suggestion
Get something cheap and second hand off eBay.
If the sound is inferior and you can hear it, get something second hand and fancy.
If you don't use it, sell it on for what you bought if for.
HMV re-opened in Peterborough a week or so ago. They have tons of vinyl in there a lot of people were looking at it.
But - it was £25.99 an album 😄
Or 3 for 66!!
Will you be buying second hand? It seems like a very expensive way to listen to music nowadays.
Unless you really must have vinyl, I think you'd be better off with a decent CD player set-up (Denon all-in-one?) and buying 2nd hand CDs for peanuts.
Just get yourself one of these phone covers.
Most important questions:
- do you have an amp and/ or speakers?
- does the turntable you're looking at have a phono stage built in (you probably want it to)?
If you don't have speakers and don't want to get an amp, you can get powered speakers, from, for example KEF. Broadly that means you can plug speakers straight into turntable (as long as it has the phono stage). You can even get bluetooth ones.
If you have passive speakers, you'll need an amp, which you may already have.
As for turntables, there's tons, even with phono (some have bluetooth too) built in - Project is all the rage right now, but Technics, Audiotechnica, Denon, Sony, blaady blaah. What you want depends very much on your budget!
I am thinking I would prefer to go a bit old school with listening to music - I miss the whole feeling of physical media & picking a CD to listen to - I really struggle with having pretty much all the music ever at my finger tips.
So I am thinking it might be time to purchase a record player - the last time I was near one was my parents hifi when I was about 8 & it was 1985.
What do I need to look out for, do I need an amp or is one with built in speakers OK?
Buy a 2nd hand CD player as you can buy cd's cheap, forget about a turntable unless you already own a stack of LP's
What's 'yer budget!
Happy with my setup - replaced a 90s Sony separates system. Now I can stream, play CDs, Minidiscs through the aux and rekkids through the phono. Physicals or lazytwonks stylee.
have this Denon
with this Pioneer turntable
and a pair of Q Acoustics speakers. Hopefully it lasts me as long as the Sony stuff did. Oh, I'll probably be dead by then 🤔
There was a thread the other day where someone was selling exactly what you were looking for, a nice compact record deck ... it was only a few £k.
The all in one record player/speaker combo's are truly truly awful. I don't mean record snob awful, I mean just rubbish like an old transistor radio.
As others have said, vinyl is expensive so with that in mind it makes no sense to me not to buy something that at least sounds as good as what you are used to from your phone.
I have probably the cheapest set up that sounds like music - A Rega P1+ Mine now has an upgraded cartridge and platter but it didn't to start with. It was about £300 and the amp/speakers it feeds into were about £600 in total. I also have a lovely old Marantz CD player I bought on Facebook for £50 as my 90's Cambridge Audio broke last year.
I got 'back into vinyl' about 6 years ago and I already had a 150 or so LPs from back in the day - kidding myself I'd just listen to them and not buy any more......suffice to say that didn't happen and I don't want to think how much I've spent on the actual media, easily as much as twice what i spent on the system.
CDs on the other hand are still cheap as chips but whilst i still buy them occasionally its not really the same.
Get whatever Pro-Ject turntable fits your budget. They're all good, and even the cheapest will sound pretty damn good. If you don't already have an amp and speakers, then a set of powered monitors/speakers is definitely the easiest way forward.
New records are ridiculously priced - £25-30 for a reissue of a classic album.
I'm lucky in that I bought a lot of vinyl back in the late 80s and 90s, and then the heyday of charity shop vinyl in the 00s when everyone was getting rid.
For new vinyl I often buy through Bandcamp as more of the money goes to the artists. For generally decent priced and well graded 2nd hand vinyl get thee to Discogs. I tend to avoid eBay for second-hand LPs as they're often over optimistically graded and in shite condition.
Easiest solution is a trip to richer sounds and a quick chat about what you want to spend and what you have already.
I still have my late 80s hi fi separates - ion amp, planar 2 deck and arcam cd. Gale speakers. It was all budget stuff back then, best buy at the price etc. It still sounds really nice. Cranked up to 11 you can't beat it ( luckily I have no neighbours). I've just had my amp rebuilt by the original UK manufacturer and it sounds awesome
Avoid a deck with built in speakers. You'll want an amp, cables and speakers. If the amp doesn't have a phono stage you'll need a preamp.
An option is something like one of the denon mini systems which you could connect the deck to ( probably need a preamp - check). The denon will have a Cd player built in and a tuner. So it makes a reasonable package at the price.