Have you considered a McIntosh MT2 or MT5?
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:
- McIntosh C260 Tube Preamp
- McIntosh MC452 Solid State Amp
- Martin Logan Montis speakers
- Various upgraded cables and wires
- Acoustically treated listening room
- Pro-Ject Debut Carbon DC turntable
- Ortofon Blue Cartridge
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!
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- 50 posts total
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. |
@terry9 I can only stand by my suggestions, as a result of having experiences that are showing strong evidence there is value in creating the certain types of conditions I refer to, as well as not resting but keeping the investigative side alive. I could have rested on the use of Densified PUR Foam when used as a Support Plinth, it proved itself to be a Wonder Material in a comparison to other available board materials, but then maybe my later discovery of how valuable a Phenolic Resin Impregnated Densified Wood is when used as a Plinth / Sub Plinth and other adaptations, will have been lost to myself. |
Off topic but relevant to the thread, I own several cartridges: stereo, true mono, that is single element single coil, or bridged internally to be mono. I no longer own it, but did own a preamp with a mono switch. In spite of what you might have read elsewhere I can assure you that no matter which of these methods is applied, they yield electrically identical results. There is no difference to be heard using any of these methods to play your mono records. |
- 50 posts total