Are Dual turntables any good?

If you want a belt-drive or idler wheel TT, with modern amenities like non-intrusive auto shutoff and/or quartz lock regulation, Duals are as good as they get. By the time the CS-506 and CS-5000 were being produced, Japan had gone whole hog into DD.

The older ones from the 70's (with the typical start-stop lever) had unreliable Auto start and Stop mechanisms, so make sure that is working. I've had three of them over the years, and while they look and feel a bit clunky compared to the Japanese, the sound was IMO better than the Japanese DD.

On the other hand, for a cheap basement system the Japanese TT's are much easier to find, set up, and use.

Not sure if anyone reading is actually interested in these minutiae but, I still have a CS-5000 too, and yeah, and when I first got it those crazy feet took a while to figure out! Not user friendly until you get the concept, but they make sense from a design standpoint, in a German kind of way. I still don't know what the red slider things do....

The only plastic is in the headshell assembly (not the tonearm) to keep weight down, since it incorporates a Vertical Tracking Angle adjuster, which would be too heavy even in aluminum. I considered removing the adjuster and just using the barebones headshell, but I think the inherent value of good VTA far exceeds whatever would be accomplished by removing excess plastic.