To venture back into vinyl or not,...that is the question.

So just to enlighten you, and bore some to tears most likely.

When I first decided to " get back into vinyl" I did exactly the same, budget of $500 for table, cart and Phonostage.
Cheapest Project table and a Bellari Phonostage.
So what did it sound like?
Garbage.....
To be fair looking back it had to compete with a 3k Esoteric cd player so I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Sold the lot and said fugg it... For a while.
Joined this site 2012 or do, read a LOT.
Revised the budget to $1500 and better but still no " magic".
To cut the story to the chase.
9 years later I have a magical system through constant upgrades and research.
Cost...... North of 10k on vinyl, well North....lol.

Sure a cheap rig will play and do so at varying levels of acceptable.
But be warned, it’s a deep, dark rabbit hole once you start from which even Alice could not escape!

Peter asks nobody at the gate for the last $500.....

have fun, enjoy the music

But what about Lucifer?

Thanks to all for your input.  

I never got rid of my old turntable (Micro Seiki MB14), but I added a couple of new ones in the past couple of years (Rega P3 and Pioneer PLX 1000). I'm really happy with the quality of the equipment. What I'm not so enthusiastic about is the quality of new pressings, including heavy-weight pressings. An unacceptably high percentage of them, including from prestigious labels, suffer from problems that cannot be eradicated by a good cleaning. While I generally prefer the sound quality of LPs to either CDs or hi-res digital recordings, I'd rather listen to a flawless hi-res recording than a noisy LP. Fortunately, I have enough old LPs in great condition that I don't consider my investments in analogue technology wasted.