eBay guide : Turntables: What should you buy?

If you are on a quest to get a good turntable, read on! I have listed a detailed, but layman friendly guide on how to select your next turntable that I hope you will find useful in your decision process.

A brief forward: After many years of being both an audiophile and a mastering engineer,(and I am still active as both), when the time came for what will most likely be my last turntable, I had to do a bit of real soul searching. The one thing that drove me nuts were some of my peers in the local audiophile community. My experience with some audiophiles is that they tend to be elitist know-it-alls, that will not give you any solid advice other than to spend lots of money like they did. Beware of these types!

You don't need to have deep pockets. I'm of the opinion that you can have great music reproduction on a minimal budget if you zero in on a turntable that will meet your needs and ear. You can find a good 'classic' table from 20.00 to 100.00 in many cases, or get a really great table for 200.00 to 500.00 or so, here on eBay.

Your turntable choice should hinge on what kind of music you listen to, the intended use for the turntable, (archiving to digital, archiving to tape, casual / general listening, or serious listening), how critical your ear is, and to the features you can't live without. For example, someone that collects bootlegs will need a table with variable pitch, as many of these records are mastered at -5% of 33 1/3, but may not need a real high-end table. For those that collect acoustic recordings that were made before 1926 when there was no real speed standard, they will also need variable pitch, but will want something with very stable speed and low noise for archiving purposes.


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Micro Seiki RX-1500 2-Speed Thread / Belt Drive Turntable (1982-90)

All Micro Seiki RX-1500 platter units feature a quadruplex suspension system.

This consists of coil spring, rubber diaphragm supported piston, compressed air and high viscosity oil. These four components form an effective guard against vibration and microphonic feedback.



The RX-1500VG and RX-1500FVG use a vacuum suction pump.

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Explanation of 44.1 kHz CD sampling rate

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/audio/44.1.html

From John Watkinson, The Art of Digital Audio, 2nd edition, pg. 104:

In the early days of digital audio research, the necessary bandwidth of about 1 Mbps per audio channel was difficult to store. Disk drives had the bandwidth but not the capacity for long recording time, so attention turned to video recorders. These were adapted to store audio samples by creating a pseudo-video waveform which would convey binary as black and white levels. The sampling rate of such a system is constrained to relate simply to the field rate and field structure of the television standard used, so that an integer number of samples can be stored on each usable TV line in the field. Such a recording can be made on a monochrome recorder, and these recording are made in two standards, 525 lines at 60 Hz and 625 lines at 50 Hz. Thus it is possible to find a frequency which is a common multiple of the two and is also suitable for use as a sampling rate.

The allowable sampling rates in a pseudo-video system can be deduced by multiplying the field rate by the number of active lines in a field (blanking lines cannot be used) and again by the number of samples in a line. By careful choice of parameters it is possible to use either 525/60 or 625/50 video with a sampling rate of 44.1KHz.

In 60 Hz video, there are 35 blanked lines, leaving 490 lines per frame or 245 lines per field, so the sampling rate is given by :

60 X 245 X 3 = 44.1 KHz

In 50 Hz video, there are 37 lines of blanking, leaving 588 active lines per frame, or 294 per field, so the same sampling rate is given by

50 X 294 X3 = 44.1 Khz.

The sampling rate of 44.1 KHz came to be that of the Compact Disc. Even though CD has no video circuitry, the equipment used to make CD masters is video based and determines the sampling rate.

(Reference kindly provided by Kavitha Parthasarathy.)

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