
Inside A £30 Record Player - edent
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/inside-a-30-record-player/
======
avolcano
I'm a pretty casual vinyl listener (mostly got into it since I like having a
physical representation of the music I love, and to reclaim some sense of
ownership in a world defined by Spotify and Apple Music). I enjoyed this post,
and more or less agree with the author's opinion that claims of superior vinyl
audio quality are bunk - and particularly meaningless in a world where most
new music is recorded or produced digitally in the first place.

That said, I probably still would avoid a cheapo player like this that does
not have an adjustable tone arm. For one, it's more likely to have issues
skipping when you can't adjust it properly. The second concern - which I'll
admit I have no data to back up, and since this is an opinion from the
audiophile community, may warrant some skepticism - is that cheap players with
unbalanced tone arms are infamous for supposedly wearing down records more
quickly over time by applying too much pressure.

The author's note about the stereo output being unbalanced, by the way, is a
relatively common side effect of an unbalanced tone arm (though there's
various other reasons it can occur).

~~~
Someone1234
There's two different arguments being conflated:

\- Vinyl is higher fidelity (yourself, and the article).

\- Vinyl sounds better.

Vinyl colors sound, in the same way that some Vacuum Tubes color sound, which
is a roundabout way of saying: They objectively make it less similar to the
reference material than straight digital. But even though Vinyl is objectively
worse at reproduction, some people prefer it (i.e. it subjectively sounds
better to _them_ ).

Why might that be? And that question itself is when you go down a rabbit hole
(e.g. Does playing a Vinyl album twice ever sound identical? And is this
imperfection more pleasurable to some people than a perfect one? Etc). I don't
own any Vinyl nor am I a big Vinyl aficionado, but there's undeniably a
colorization when listening to a song in Vinyl Vs. digital, and then we get
into the subjective realm of if this is "better" or "worse."

PS - This is true all across the audio reproduction realm. For example horn
Vs. reference-style speakers, horns also heavily colorize and are quite
popular (particularly for Home Theater), but are also divisive because it is
objectively "worse" (but subjectively "better" for some).

~~~
mtts
One other reason why vinyl sounds better is that how it’s mastered. For
streaming, tracks are optimized for low quality headphones and phone speakers.
Loudness is all that is required.

Mastering for vinyl, however, takes effort. Do it wrong and the record becomes
unplayable. So when you have to put in the effort anyway, might as well make
it sound good at the same time.

A/B some tracks some time. Chances are the vinyl version sounds more polished
with a bit more dynamics instead of having everything slam into a limiter.
This has nothing to do with sound coloring or “warmth”.

~~~
input_sh
I mean, compared to the majority of streaming platforms (YouTube, Spotify),
sure. But there's the entire world of lossless music that just outperforms
vinyls in every way.

But yeah, in both cases, you'd need to shell out at least a couple of hundred
euros on speakers to fully experience either vinyls or lossless, and that has
proven to be not important to the vast majority of the people.

I have a pretty large collection of lossless files, a record player, some
vinyls, and speakers that allow me to tell the difference, but I still play
Spotify on them like 95% of the time.

~~~
tuatoru
> you'd need to shell out at least a couple of hundred euros on speakers to
> fully experience either vinyls or lossless.

A pair of Sony MDR-7506es would do it. The workhorse cans of the recording
industry.

~~~
nseggs
Don’t forget the converters. A lot of people get crazy headphones and connect
them to their laptop headphone jack or a cheap Focusrite interface where poor
design and pcb layout mean you can literally hear the power section.

------
encom
Don't buy a new record player. I just bought a used Technics SL2000 for ~120€.
Maybe you've heard of the Technics 1200, which is quite famous. The 2000 is a
cheaper model in that series. It's from the late 70's, but unlike me it still
works perfectly.

120€ is triple the cost of what OP paid, but you get a TT that's actually more
than a gimmick. And you also get a far better product than what you could buy
new at the same price.

There's a lot of audiophile insanity in this field, and trying to find actual
concrete information about pickups and turntables is made difficult by the
amount of nonsense you have to wade through. But I think the appeal of records
and turntables, is something similar to retro computing. It's slow and
impractical, and it can be expensive, but the act of putting on a record and
listening to a whole album, is just a different experience that streaming
cannot replicate.

Just don't go full hipster about it.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
I inherited many 78 rpm records from my great-grandparents by way of my
deceased grandparents and deceased parents.

They are from the 1920s-1940s. I've spent countless hours trying to find the
right turntable to buy and then the right cartridge (people say the groove
widths were different in the 1920s or 30s so i need special stylus with those
records but not the ones from the 40s...maybe?). It's maddening... i just want
to listen to what my great-grandparents listened to without damaging the
media... but it seems to take weeks of research because there are thousands of
opinions.

p.s. i never met my great-grandparents and thought this would be a cool way to
get to know them.

~~~
encom
You do need a special stylus, and they're still made today. Good example here:

[https://www.ortofon.com/ortofon-2m-78-p-598-n-1579](https://www.ortofon.com/ortofon-2m-78-p-598-n-1579)

It shouldn't be that hard to find a decent turntable with 78 RPM.

------
myrandomcomment
Vinyl is not "better". It just sounds different than digital playback. Some
people like the characteristic of the sound output of vinyl better. It can be
mostly described at "warmer" or "has more colour". Others really enjoy the
physical nature of a record. I have both a large collection of ripped CDs to
lossless format and vinyl records. I can tell the difference between the same
album played on each medium. In both cases the music is being played to the
same set of speakers via the same tube amp. Is one better than the other? That
is down to what you like! Would say for most rock/pop/metal it does not
matter. For classical/jazz/opera I prefer the sound of the vinyl.

One issue that others have pointed out is that how you master counts for a ton
of how the music sounds. Unfortunely you can mess with the music more on the
digital medium (there was for a long time a race to loudness and compression)
which made things sound just freaking bad on mid-range setup. It was okay in
headphones, but on any decent system it would sound like crap. The last few
Metallica albums were like this.

At the end if you do like to listen to vinyl do NOT use a cheap player like
this. Playing is physical motion and the tracking weight of the tone arm being
high will destroy your vinyl.

There are tons of audiophile sites out there and some (most?) of the
information you need to apply a reality filter to, but some of the reviews are
pretty good. If you are looking for a good mid-range starter record player I
recommend you look at the stuff from Rega. You can get a good very simple
player for <$500 (I did not say cheap).

~~~
Taniwha
Exactly - the same can can be said for tube amps, they're not perfect, they
distort, but in a way that people like

~~~
myrandomcomment
100%. I have had a few. It was really interesting to just swap tube sets and
see how it changed the sound.

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userbinator
IC2 is not populated but the pinout looks like an I2C EEPROM, so it could be
used for storing settings. The pinout of the main IC doesn't match a PCM2902E,
and in any case that doesn't have an EEPROM function.

The ratio between the motor and turntable is likely 34:1, as that gives some
reasonable speeds...

    
    
        1130 / 34 = 33.24
        1520 / 34 = 44.71
        2360 / 34 = 69.41
    

...except for the last one which is presumably for 78 but quite a bit below.

------
Bud
The author's bashing of "original" 1960s turntables is, of course,
unwarranted. A lot of those turntables were, and still are, quite good.

~~~
tuatoru
"A lot" is overstating things. (I was there.)

The ones from then that are still around these days ... some of them can be
OK, if properly reconditioned.

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Marazan
You can definetly hear it is pitched up.

~~~
edent
That's so interesting. I was thinking about comparing the length of tracks
with the CD. Or using OpenCV to count the RPM. I had no idea people could hear
subtle pitch changes like that.

~~~
Marazan
It's more obvious on the second clip to me but both sound clearly off to my
ear.

~~~
stordoff
Vocal made it more immediately obvious, but both was fairly noticeable to me
(though I'm not sure how much I would have noticed the first one if it wasn't
such a well known piece).

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WalterBright
I bought a cheap record player to play with, and put a decent cartridge in it.
The main problem was it turned too slowly. Drilling a hole in the bottom
exposed the potentiometer that controlled the speed.

The problem was determining its speed.

I finally figured out a no-buck solution. I wanted to tune it to 33 1/3 rpm.
So I taped a piece of paper to the turntable that would thwack against the
tonearm pivot on each revolution, then counted the thwacks in a minute, and
adjusted for 33 and a bit. Worked fine!

P.S. attempting to count the revolutions by watching it spin is an exercise in
madness.

~~~
cardiffspaceman
Lots of turntables in the 80's had flickering lights lighting a pattern of
dots on the edge of the turntable. The pattern would stand still if the
turntable was revolving at the right speed. My Technics had a pattern for 33
1/3 and for 45. Is this something you could try?

~~~
WalterBright
You can buy a "record" with those dots on it, but then you'll also need a neon
bulb connected to 60 Hz power to flicker at the right speed.

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jhallenworld
The pot is probably for adjusting the motor speed. This is VR151 on the
circuit board.

~~~
edent
Thanks. I'm new to electronic circuits. Could I replace the pot with something
digitally controlled? My eventual plan is to replace the main board with an
SBC.

~~~
smogcutter
I’m having a hard time imagining a reason that pot would need to be digitally
controlled. It would be set at the factory and isn’t meant to be adjusted
during use. It looks like its role is to be tuned to account for resistor
tolerance in the motor’s circuit—-otherwise each board would have a slightly
different current going to the motor, and different speed.

If the goal is to switch between 33 and 45 digitally, then I figure you’re
better off finding that switch on the circuit board and replacing it with a
relay or something.

~~~
compiler-guy
High quality turntables have a speed control and dots with strobes on the side
of the platter for you to get the speed exactly right. So a non adjustable
resister here is a sign of lower quality. Making it digital would be great to
get the pitch exactly right.

~~~
smogcutter
The digital pot the other person posted uses 7 bits for 0-10k ohms, so it’s
_much_ less precise than a real trim pot. For most arduino type applications
that’s probably fine, but if the goal is to get super anal about nailing 33
1/3 rpm exactly, and keeping it in tune over slight environmental changes,
then it really isn’t good enough.

I guess it would be fun to come up with some kind of feedback scheme that
trims the digital pot automatically. But as a practical thing rather than a
for the heck of it project it really doesn’t seem to be worth the effort over
just using a pot.

~~~
tuatoru
> some kind of feedback scheme that trims the digital pot automatically

Yeah, PID controllers are around, I think. (proportional-integral-
differential.) Quite easy to do on an Arduino if not readily avaialble.

But better to PWM-control the drive transistor directly than adjust a digital
pot.

~~~
smogcutter
Good call, pwm would be the way to go.

I feel like most hobby projects of mine end like this: bring home a bag of
stuff from fry’s, realize while futzing with the breadboard that it’s a much
simpler problem than I first thought, wind up with a bag of unused stuff from
fry’s because I don’t want to drive back to Burbank to return it.

------
oriolid
I don't get the reasoning that because the cheapest possible vinyl player
sounds horrible, all vinyl players sound horrible. It really goes the other
way: vinyl record is a medium that depends on fine mechanics and amplification
for very low signal levels to work, so it just takes a bit of money to build a
decent record player and preamp. Because of the vinyl boom of last 10 years or
so, the current record players may be better and more affordable than ever,
but this one is just sub par.

~~~
sydd
That's not the reasoning. He mentions at least one thing: Vinyl records sping
with the same speed for the whole record, so the audio quality gets worse
toward the end. This is not the case with digital recordings.

~~~
tuatoru
Some things he doesn't mention

\- Because of the pivoting nature of the playback tonearm, you get a minimum
of 2.5 degrees tracking error on the inner grooves as well. This causes some
distortion.

\- The very best playback cartridges have intrinsic total harmonic distortion
figures up around 0.5%, which is second-worst in the audio chain, only
exceeded by speakers (typically 1%-3% for good quality speakers).

Mechanically induced distortion is mainly second harmonic, though, and is less
grating than odd-harmonic distortion, as you get with electrical clipping and
DAC artefacts.

~~~
oriolid
Yes, those things are true. They do set limits on accurately vinyl record
player can reproduce the original signal, but they certainly do not mean that
all record players are as bad as this one.

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notmyfriend
If price is no object you an always get a ELP LT-1LRC that uses a laser to
read the vinyl disk.

~~~
encom
The problem with that (I've heard), is that it also "reads" all the dirt in
the groove, that a stylus usually pushes out of the way.

------
bartread
The tone of this article is incredibly obnoxious. This would be slightly (but
only slightly) easier to swallow if I wasn't nursing doubts throughout about
the author's knowledgeability. For example:

> Early Beatles music was specifically mastered to sound good on crackly AM
> radios and craptacular Dansette record players.

I have news for you: vast swathes of popular music are specifically mastered
to sound good on low end equipment. That's as true today as it was in the
1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and noughties.

As an example, Michael Jackson's Thriller, along with plenty of other albums
in the late 70s and 80s, was mastered using Auratone 5C Super Sound Cubes.
These sound absolutely awful, but they give you useful information about what
your mix is going to sound like on low-end equipment. A modern equivalent
would be something like the Avantone MixCube, which I highly rate even though
it also sounds horrendous.

If your music only sounds good on audiophile level equipment, that's obviously
fine, but you have to be realistic about how that's going to limit your
potential market.

Similarly, the digs at vintage turntables also smack of ignorance. Again, most
"hi-fi" equipment throughout the decades has sat at the low end of the quality
spectrum because that's where the biggest market is. Most people are perfectly
happy with sound systems that have passable playback quality, which is
absolutely fine. However, certainly since the late 1960s, it's been possible
to buy higher end equipment if you crave better sound quality.

And, on that note, as others have done I would also highly recommend picking
up used hi-fi equipment rather than new. There are some real bargains to be
had and it's relatively straightforward to build a great sounding system
without breaking the bank. It's also quite fun and rewarding.

(Finally, on sound quality, whilst CD is objectively better than vinyl, and
has for example significantly higher dynamic range, it is quite possible for a
vinyl recording to sound better than a CD. An example of where this might be
the case is for albums that were remastered for CD during the loudness war
era, which can introduce serious clipping issues[0] and significantly reduce
the dynamic range of the CD master relative to the vinyl original. In this
kind of situation - and, of course, it does depend on having at least half
decent gear - it's entirely possible for the vinyl version to sound better
than the CD remaster, even though CD as a format is capable of noticeably
higher quality and greater dynamic range than vinyl.)

 _[0] This often results in harsh sounding recordings that are quite tiring to
listen to, particularly at higher volumes. If you have the option of patching
a graphic equalizer into your signal path you can use it to somewhat take the
edge off recordings like this, although it 's obviously not ideal. I generally
prefer listening with EQ bypassed but sometimes I find I have to use it. You
can also use EQ to compensate for a less than ideal listening environment._

~~~
omar_alt
Owning old vinyl to play on well made second hand gear is far more sustainable
than streaming music which has a poor EULA or storing terabytes of audio where
you only listen to roughly 1%. You can argue the same with CD’s but disc rot
is an increasing issue.

~~~
bartread
> You can argue the same with CD’s but disc rot is an increasing issue.

Yeah, I live in fear of this: have hundreds of CDs, plus games for various
systems on CD, DVD-ROM and Blu-Ray. All of them will gradually become
unreadable although, so far, I've been fortunate.

