Best set up for 78's ?

Instead of the PL120, for around $200 you can get the Stanton T.90. The Stanton comes with a stanton 500 cart so it's a better deal. And the Stanton 500 also happens to be the best affordable cart for 78 playback. You will have to get a 3 mil stylii, but those are easy to find and also very affordable. It also offers digital output, which may or may not be of interest. This should be the top choice for entry level 78 without going used.

For the next step up I would suggest a Lenco.

For the eq curves, on a budget set up you can get by with a plain old multi-band equalizer.

I will say that Lostchord's memories are deceiving him. Some 78's can be enjoyable for sure (while others sound like garbage), have a different flavor sound, and also have non-musical value as artifacts but, no, they're not rivaling modern lps. Or CDs. Some did sound better than their lp equivalents during the very first year or so that lps were first on the market, but that's a very limited exception to my statement. Also, the last generation of 78s often were not direct-to-disc.

Mapman: DiamondCut is superior software for transfering 78s to digital. If one is mainly concerned with transfering to digital, then DiamondCut will handle all the eq curves, speed adjustment etc. and you don't have to worry about the extra gear and money to do that in the analogue domain.

Sometimes with a rough record you get a better transfer by playing it at a slower speed and correcting the speed later. Warps that can launch the stylus at 78 rpm may be trackable at lower speed.

Mapman, you are on target. Important things are higher mass playback setup, variable speed, 78 stylus, and even a cheap equalizer will do. Picking approriate gear is important, but matching for sytem synergies and balancing "PRaT" vs harmonic richness and all that other LP stuff is not on the table with these limited band width, high noise recordings.

A $30 Stanton 500 with a 78 stylus. But a passable flip-over ceramic can also yield acceptable results.

A 60s or 70s Dual, P-E, Lenco, Rek-O-Kut, Garrrd 4HF. A cheaper Garrard or an average 1960s changer (V-M, Collaro) will sound good on later 78s but lack varying pitch for the older ones and will have bit more rumble.

A mono blend. Blend at the interconnects if you don't have a switch.

Some kind of eq ability. A 10 band eq from an 80s "rack system" and you're good. But wide range tone controls are a help.

Going beyond that, you're dealing with significantly diminishing returns.

Accoustic era 78s (pre 1924 or so) have no eq (as one would expect). The majority of 78s you'll commonly encounter in the US from later periods use a 500 cycle turnover.

But the thing is, the frequency response was so ragged, and quality control and disc history so varying, that there's no reason to knock yourself out for the handful of records you may - or may not - have that use alternative eq curves.

That's not to say you wouldn't get a meaningful improvement with, say, a huge transcription deck like an RCA 70 series, long "transcription" tonearm, archival phono equalizer, and, most of all an array of custom styli. While you're at it, a single-ended amp and a single large horn speaker.

But that also requires spending more time selecting stylus and curves and preping each disc than listening to it. If you're doing serious digital transfers that's necessary. If you just want to listen once in a while to the crate or two of 78s you may have inherited or picked up at a grage sale, IMO it's silly.

Keep in mind that when you listen to 78 transfers on CDs and vinyl, they've been processed, sometimes painstakingly, in a manner that can't ordinarily be done in real time playback. It at least requires some extra processing gear that we haven't talked about so far. So don't expect to hear the same thing.

But I'd like to recommend "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of." Also "Joe Bussard's Basement." The recordings are from the early electrical period. Some of their discs are quite nice and others are quite poor but used because they may be the only known copy. They leave in more of the surface noise than the big commercial companies usually do, but the music also has a ton of life and vibrancy that's usually missing from reissues of such old records. This you can more easily get at home.

Then there's the Nimbus method. They used to play accoustic era 78s on a modified accoustic horn phonograph. There's a lot to be said for this, too, for accoustic era 78s. I once did some transfers by playing the records on my Victrola, recording them digitally with a pair of stereo mics mounted a few feet in front of the cabinet, and then applying a little eq, noise reduction and compression afterwards. I liked the results. You don't get the detail or frequency extremes, but quick transient clicks and pops don't get reproduced -- there's more of a steady-state Chhhh that's less districting (like tape hiss at a lower frequency) -- and there was a natural horn in a room ambience reflecting the way the records were expected to be heard.