Upgrade My Turntable - How Much Do I Need to Spend?
I have recently fallen in love with listening to vinyl on my turntable. In recent years, I have spent most of my listening time with digital music stored on my server (flac files recorded from CD's), but recently I discovered the beauty of placing an album on the turntable and listening to the entire album. It's been a wonderful find for me.
My 2-channel room features:
My question is: how big of a step up do I need to make with my turntable to take full advantage of the other components in my system? I do not intend to do further upgrades with my speakers or amp system, but I would like to step up my game from the introductory level turntable that I bought years ago.
I've been doing lots of reading and studying, but I would love to hear advice from some of the analog experts on this forum. (Please don't flame my current system - there are reasons I love my McIntosh and those components are not going anywhere!) Should I make a move to a $4000 turntable? Or???? I would love to find a lightly used Rega RP10, and call my search over - but what do others think?
One thing that I believe I value is a simple setup. I have read horror stories about how much time and frustration can go into getting a turntable setup and then constantly having to tinker for optimal performance. I don't see myself enjoying that part of the process.
Thanks!
I appreciate that it might be difficult to accept that isolation does not matter in my case, and so might not matter in other cases - but - (1) I just made an azimuth adjustment of 5 minutes of arc, and now can hear no reliable difference +/- 2 minutes; (2) I can hear the teflon bearings in my 1.8 W precision motor - not cogging, but friction. How could I hear those fine details with sonic interference from the suspension? (or, more precisely, the lack of suspension) Seems like there is a trade-off, and my turntable is sinking more noise than it's sourcing. |
@pindac Should have cited you. See above. |
