Turntable Reviews

Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Quality turntable at a budget price
Excellent pre-mounted cartridge
Versatile hook up options
Minus
Setup is a bit fussy
Inaccurate speed as shipped
No analog cable included
No leveling feet

THE VERDICT
While it is possible to spend less, the Monolith turntable marks a perfect entry point for a turntable that sounds good, offers a host of hookup options, and has a clear upgrade path.

As someone who works with turntables almost every day, one question I get pretty frequently is, "How much do I need to spend to get a real taste of what the buzz with vinyl is all about?" Defining the entry level for record players can be tricky. Spend too little and you're probably going to be disappointed and lose interest pretty quickly. Spend too much and you're likely to dismiss playing records as just another overpriced fad.

The proposition is hard to resist. Buy a turntable with a USB output, connect it to your PC, and digitize your vinyl for 21st-century listening. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. The wrong way is to use one of those handy new cheap plastic turntables with a USB output. Sorry, a bad turntable is a bad turntable whether it has a USB jack or not. It falls down on the analog side of the job, ensuring a bad-sounding digital outcome. This warning has been conspicuously absent from clueless mainstream media coverage of the USB-turntable genre.

After having been declared dead sometime back in the 1990s, analog turntables and vinyl records have made a strong comeback in recent years. That's great, but for people who come from the CD or iPod generations, it's hard to comprehend just how tweaky the world of analog playback can be. Unlike a CD player or iPod which you simply connect and play, most turntables require careful optimization to deliver the best possible sound.

I’d had my AR ES-1 turntable for about 20 years when a tenant burned my house — and the turntable and about 3,000 records — to the ground the one time I decided to rent it. If this sad story has a silver lining, it’s that it sent me back into the world of vinyl and turntables.

Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Newly engineered from the ground up
Exceptional pitch stability
Includes 78 rpm speed
Minus
DJ features are irrelevant for most users
Detachable headshell may limit tonearm performance
No factory-installed cartridge option

THE VERDICT
Technics’s reborn legendary DJ turntable is now a better bet than ever for home audiophile use, but no longer quite the bargain it once was.

Way back in the May 2010 issue of Sound & Vision, I compared three sub-$1,000 turntables, including one that I felt was a bit of a rebellious choice for the audiophile listener. Over its nearly 40 years of production, the Technics SL-1200 series had morphed from one of the top models in the company’s industry-leading range of audiophile direct-drive turntables into a deck that was aimed squarely at the club and DJ market.