Having spent a few solid weeks scouring and searching as much of the internet as possible (you can read that here), I’m relatively confident I know what I want and I can now make a well informed decision on what could possibly be a suitable turntable to purchase…hopefully.
In fact, I’ve spent so long scouring the internet on www.thevinylfactory.com and www.vinylengine.com that when my wife asked me what I was looking at, my automatic response was to reply ‘porn’. She was that bored of me replying that I was yet again looking at turntables and everything associated with them!
Options
With my pitiful budget in mind and my thorough search knowledge that I couldn’t afford anything new, I turned to eBay and I placed a few searches including:
Pro-Ject, Technics, Thorens, NAD 533 and Rega to name just 5 and then waited and watched any listing that had potential.
A Pro-Ject Elemental
NAD 533
eBay
eBay is both good and bad for vinyl lovers. There’s always the chance of a second hand bargain. But on the flip side, it’s usually where you can find the highly inflated Record Store Day releases minutes after the shops opened. However as I’m far from any serious record shops or even second hand turntable shops, I didn’t have much choice.
Hoping I’d be able to secure a bargain, I scoured eBay as often as I could. Unfortunately it appears many other vinyl fans have also had the same idea. Pro-Ject and Rega listings quickly jumped on and exceed my desired £30-£50 wish list price within hours of being listed. They usually sell for £100 or more. My mission it appears would be over before I barely started.
So I searched ‘Turntables’. Well that was a mistake, a mine field was opened, have you searched ‘Turntables’? give it a go, there’s literally pages and pages, so that was quickly closed.
However, there soon became hope, under my Technics search, I noticed a few SL5’s were usually going for £20-£30. Looking in to these a little further I found a few glowing reviews on Vinyl Engine so I started watching them with a little more enthusiasm.
A Technics SL5
It’s fair to say they don’t have the minimal sexiness of the more recent turntables and the buttons are definitely from the 80’s. However, with it’s great reviews and more importantly, cheap selling price, it looked liked this was my only option.
to be continued