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Hi, I've had a fairly large vinyl collection sitting around doing nothing for a few years ever since my last turntable ceased functioning - until recently, that is. An extremely generous close friend of the family gave me his more-or-less fully upgraded and very well maintained 30ish-year-old Linn Sondek LP12 as a gift!
Needless to say I've gotten back into playing my vinyl in a big way. So much so that I'm now looking for a second turntable for the bedroom. I can't even begin to afford or remotely justify another deck anything like as expensive as the Sondek. Really I'm looking at a budget of around £170 - and that will have to include a phono stage.
I'm considering the Cambridge Audio AZUR 551P for the phono stage which would leave about £100 for the turntable. There are a couple of other constraints, too.
Firstly, as it's for the bedroom I'm looking for something with automatic lift and stop (I don't care about any other automatic features) - I will certainly be falling asleep whist listening to records and I don't want it running all night and wearing down the stylus.
Secondly, due to space constraints the turntable is going to have to sit on the same surface as the speakers, not an ideal arrangement by any means but there really is no other option in this case - so I'm really looking for a suspended chassis model for decent vibration damping. I'll also place sorbothane pads under the feet of the turntable for a bit of additional damping (the speakers are already sitting on sorbothane discs).
Thirdly, I'm really looking for something that takes a standard 1/2 inch cartridge so I can upgrade in future.
So far in my price range (and it has taken quite a bit of research to get even this far) I seem to be looking at the Dual CS505-2 or 505-3 (the 505-1 apparently doesn't take a standard 1/2 inch cartridge, at least not without an adapter). They are selling fairly regularly on ebay for around the £100 mark or slightly under. From what I've read they're very decent for the price and also have the advantage that replacement belts and so forth are comparatively easy to get hold of.
However before taking the plunge and bidding on one of these I was wondering if anyone could suggest any other models which might fit my requirements - I like to keep my options open! Any thoughts?
Hi, I've had a fairly large vinyl collection sitting around doing nothing for a few years ever since my last turntable ceased functioning - until recently, that is. An extremely generous close friend of the family gave me his more-or-less fully upgraded and very well maintained 30ish-year-old Linn Sondek LP12 as a gift!
Needless to say I've gotten back into playing my vinyl in a big way. So much so that I'm now looking for a second turntable for the bedroom. I can't even begin to afford or remotely justify another deck anything like as expensive as the Sondek. Really I'm looking at a budget of around £170 - and that will have to include a phono stage.
I'm considering the Cambridge Audio AZUR 551P for the phono stage which would leave about £100 for the turntable. There are a couple of other constraints, too.
Firstly, as it's for the bedroom I'm looking for something with automatic lift and stop (I don't care about any other automatic features) - I will certainly be falling asleep whist listening to records and I don't want it running all night and wearing down the stylus.
Secondly, due to space constraints the turntable is going to have to sit on the same surface as the speakers, not an ideal arrangement by any means but there really is no other option in this case - so I'm really looking for a suspended chassis model for decent vibration damping. I'll also place sorbothane pads under the feet of the turntable for a bit of additional damping (the speakers are already sitting on sorbothane discs).
Thirdly, I'm really looking for something that takes a standard 1/2 inch cartridge so I can upgrade in future.
So far in my price range (and it has taken quite a bit of research to get even this far) I seem to be looking at the Dual CS505-2 or 505-3 (the 505-1 apparently doesn't take a standard 1/2 inch cartridge, at least not without an adapter). They are selling fairly regularly on ebay for around the £100 mark or slightly under. From what I've read they're very decent for the price and also have the advantage that replacement belts and so forth are comparatively easy to get hold of.
However before taking the plunge and bidding on one of these I was wondering if anyone could suggest any other models which might fit my requirements - I like to keep my options open! Any thoughts?
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