allenh

I've picked up a couple of turntables recently. This ones a Trio (Kenwood in the US) KD-1033, cost me £25 shipped from ebay and just needed a headshell and cart. Not a bad little table and these are generally a bargain over here although you do see the odd one up for silly money, this one was particularly cheap so it's going to get the full Cardas rewire treatment and a full service to see how good I can make it embarrass a few things a lot more expensive, the basics are there so I'm pretty sure there are quite a few new tables it will upset by the time I've finished with it. The next is a JVC QL-Y3F, I got this one in a deal so it doesn't owe me a lot of money and I'm liking it, superbly speed stable and it tracks superbly well, the AT MC cart in it is quite nice although it's a little bass heavy and mid light, it's not unpleasant just different and I do quite like it but I'll try another cart I know well in it to see if it is the cart that makes it sound that way or if it is the table itself that makes it that way.

Give it up man, what in the name of all that is holy has that got to do with cats?

I have a ginger cat stupid enough to fall for that more than once, in fact he's the only cat I have ever seen that falls off or out of stuff on a regular basis and uses his fat backside as a substitute for his feet in the landing. How we panicked when he decided tree climbing was a fun thing to do. We have the vets on speed dial.

I have to say that cats expression fits his predicament completely, I keep watching expecting him to barf but it's not happened yet, must have the constitution of an ox.

Richard heads please, formal standards do need to be upheld. Also while I'm correcting it's replies not replys and yes yours is probably a bootleg, I've got the same one somewhere, paid a tenner for it at Camden market a good while ago, nice pressing though for a bootleg. Still can't believe I'm in b4 the lock though.

Very true, that is the sad truth in the quest for sonic nirvana, all electronics will colour the sound but it's still the quest for it not to, so as an engineer and a music lover I am constantly trying to get as close as I can but the truth is my idea of neutral will be different to someone else's. The closest approach with a pre amplifier in theory is to use a passive one as there are no electronics to colour the sound, (a complete misnomer as it's an attenuator not an amplifier but who lets engineering fact get in the way of jargon in hifi) the down side of a passive pre is that you can get impedance matching issues with them but that aside having tried a few and still owning one I find I don't actually like the ones I've tried so I must actually like my music coloured in some way as most people do but not always in the same way as the next person, hence all the opinion in relation to Hifi and how it sounds. There is also the cultural aspect to take into account where for example the general feeling is that the far eastern ear much prefers an emphasis in the high frequencies with very little bottom, a north American ear prefers an emphasis on the low end and a European ear an emphasis on the middle frequencies, as I say a generalization but after having heard a lot of equipment from these different markets there is definitely something in that, Sony for quite a while used to produce amplifiers specifically for the British Market with "British tuned" stickers on the front because they were acutely aware of this. The only way to find what fits for you is to listen yourself to as much equipment as possible but listening without making huge changes so that you hear the equipment difference not the difference you've made and you can't do that if you are constantly tweaking the EQ. also any EQ is very crude as it is basically a wide range filter that allows some things through and not others within it's bandwidth so by making big changes to the EQ you are limiting what your amplifier can give you. We can't suggest what's best for you as your ears will be the only things that can tell you that and also availability of particular brands and items will be different for you than they are for me but try and have a read through the beginners post, I know it's 17 million pages long and you've probably already read a lot of it but there is some very very good info in there that I'm sure will register with you and what you are most likely going to like. That said going on your current preference I'm going to suggest Rotel and Yamaha in general but bear in mind most far eastern manufacturers make and have made at some time from utter crap all the way up to absolute gems and it's just the weighting of where in that scale the majority of their output lives and when it was made as some brands have brief periods of brightness and then fade into obscurity or just destroy their reputation by continuing to trade on it whilst producing shite. Mostly leave the bloody EQ alone and just enjoy the music.

I'm an engineer not an English teacher, think yourself lucky I can manage a whole sentence. Well spotted though I usually re read my diatribes for the odd faux pas but I missed that one, have a house point.

No one is trying to be elitist just trying to impart a bit of experience from listening to a whole load of audio equipment over a long period of time. All Hifi is trying to reproduce the music without colouration, and by colouration I mean altering the replayed sound by being more responsive to an area of audio within the replayed spectrum so that you hear more of one thing than another, e.g people like Bose push up the high end to make you think the reproduction is picking out the details, it's not it's over emphasizing them at the cost of the middle and bass lower down. Marantz were also a little guilty of this in their time but nowhere near Bose levels. Also no amplifier is capable of being neutral across the whole audio spectrum so it will colour the music somewhere and the same is true of all speakers and to a lesser degree every bit of audio in the chain. Tone controls of any sort put a stage in the amplifier that is unwanted because of the above plus it's a limiting factor and signal attenuator too a degree but is put there for 3 main reasons. 1) the manufacturer thinks the customer expects it 2) in an attempt to tidy the colouration but it fails because it makes it worse somewhere else. 3) to make the customer think they are getting more for their money. You can just run everything flat i.e all 3 controls in the middle but I suspect the colouration of other things within your system mean you need to use the tone controls but it will always be a compromise. There are a couple of hifi clichés here, usually the best hifi you've heard is the last and once you've heard really really good you will be forever chasing it and emptying your wallet. My advise stick with what you like but understand why it's wrong and don't ever listen to anything really good whatever you do.

It's your ears and your equipment and I'm with you on liking 70's electronics but like modern equipment it starts at shit works all the way up to absolutely jaw dropping and stops at all the places in between, so all that tells me is that you haven't heard enough of any of it yet. I've heard an absolute shit load and still know I've only scratched the surface and am still constantly impressed and underwhelmed in equal measure by the things I hear. I like the proper 70's Marantz sound but not as much as I like other 70's equipment which is just a matter of personal preference but EQ's like sub's are the devils work!, if you need them you need them but all they are doing is masking a system deficiency somewhere or it means the recording engineer hasn't done his or her job properly. I saw a review of a couple of cars once (can't remember which) but one was British and the other Japanese and the reviewer used a couple of AV receivers to make a point in that he said on the Japanese one If I go though all these menu's and sub menu's and different modes I can make it sound almost as good as the British one but what's the point, the British one I just turn on and it sounds gorgeous, In other words no need for all that extra complexity just make the thing right in the first place.

Firstly the turntable needs a shelf of it's own just to get it of the top of the amp because that's just wrong regardless of flooring or anything else. The amp needs to breathe and the amp and the turntable don't need to vibrate each other in the wrong way so fix that first. Then it's half squash balls, half tennis balls or similar under the feet as @andynz suggested and if that don't cure it the only other real option is a wall mounted shelf.

Firstly the turntable needs a shelf of it's own just to get it of the top of the amp because that's just wrong regardless of flooring or anything else. The amp needs to breathe and the amp and the turntable don't need to vibrate each other in the wrong way so fix that first. Then it's half squash balls, half tennis balls or similar under the feet as @andynz suggested and if that don't cure it the only other real option is a wall mounted shelf.

Firstly the turntable needs a shelf of it's own just to get it of the top of the amp because that's just wrong regardless of flooring or anything else. The amp needs to breathe and the amp and the turntable don't need to vibrate each other in the wrong way so fix that first. Then it's half squash balls, half tennis balls or similar under the feet as @andynz suggested and if that don't cure it the only other real option is a wall mounted shelf.

I picked up some Naim Intro II speakers yesterday. I'm not a fan of the Naim sound and these are not Naim's best attempt at speakers but for £30 I couldn't leave them there. Tried them on some charity shop Marantz I picked up and they're ok just cold like everything Naim I've heard or owned. I'm going to replace the tweeters with some ribbons, remove the crossovers, run them active and drive them with some valves, if that doesn't cheer them up nothing will.

What I really really want to know is why when I haven't clicked on any links or videos or adverts or anything whatsoever about this particular bilge ridden marketing machine from when it started apart from the odd read of this very thread I still get bloody adverts from them on Facebook and google? As someone said that Nick Alt is a marketing genius. And I told Facebook it was offensive to me which stopped it but I bet not for long.

Exactly. I've been a lifelong fan all the way back from Travelogue and then went back and discovered Reproduction. Luckily I still have all my originals so don't really need it, I will say though that modern league vinyl does get pricey when it's sold out, I'm glad I bought a copy of Credo when it came out.

No I'm just poor old people addicted to shiny stuff, when the shiny stuff addiction takes hold it's goodbye wallet. Anyway the Astronaut Cowboy Millionaire gigs already taken shaizada took that ages ago

Very nice, I love a Garrard 301 or 401. Had lots of them but pretty rare where you are and a few pennies I reckon, they cost a few quid here so I hate to think what it cost you there. The hammer finish grease bearing one I sold to a nice man in Japan about 10 years ago is the one I always regret letting go. The standard fitment for them arm wise is a SME 3009 or preferably a 3012 and ideally a series 2 improved but either way a 12" arm is the order of the day with them generally for the best results. I've got a 401 and a 3009 here that I need to get a plinth for at some point but too many projects and too little time.

Double post

This. I struggle with why people want to use low bitrate USB of the type used in pretty much every turntable related USB to rip vinyl or record anything for that matter, it's utter shit. Using any half decent Goodwill or other chairty shop sourced turntable and integrated amplifier or receiver you line in and out of the amp using the tape loop and treating the computer as a cassette deck. Then use some free software like Audacity to record it. Costs next to bugger all and does a lot better job than the majority of the USB devices, chances are your charity shop amp will have a half decent phono stage in it already as well. You can make a perfectly good turntable out of the LP120 by ripping out all the audio electronics and rewiring the arm, so as you already have one it would be a suitable substitute and probably an improvement over the charity shop turntable in the above.

Can you not make or buy a simple stand that sits over the amp to put you turntable on? It would lift it away and isolate it from the amp and you could hide the wires behind it. The speakers though you need to find a way of hiding the wires and get the speakers into a proper position to get the best out of them so in the walls, under the floor or behind the skirting boards it is, you can get mini trunking that you can run along the floor where it meets the skirting board that is very effective of fit it as if it were a picture rail along the wall.

It's 1st and 3rd Fridays of the month and some Saturdays

Got mine yesterday as well. Nice package and sounds great. The 7 was buried deep inside the LP sleeve so I initially thought mine was missing.

I sent my wife into HMV to see if she could pick up a signed one or a HMV pink or both and she came back with this. I knew there was a reason I keep her around

Oops the bug has bitten. Seen it before and there's no helping you now. Say bye bye to the contents of your bank account and welcome to the sad hand to mouth existence of the HiFi junkie, it's all down hill from here

I thought my browser was doing strange things but a triple post I'm impressed with. I suppose it hammers home how very dead I'm going to be when she works out how much money is sitting here