Turntable help Please

Pops,

As for a phono stage, NAD, Parasound,and Creek all make MM phono stages for less than $200. I'm using the NAD which I bought here for less than $100.

Not knowing the overall sytem you
have or your budget makes any
recommendation questionable. One
good combination that would last
you for a long time would be a used
Well Tempered Labs unit going for
$ 450 to 650 which includes a good tonearm.
High output Grado cart. is a good starting
point and is more flexible than most MC
carts. recommended previously. Grado's
are a bit warmer and lush sounding to my
ears than the lower priced MC units.
As price and associated gear increases,
so does many of the better/higher priced
items on the market. What I like about Well
Labs and Grado is they are US made and they
respond to e-mails and telephone calls. I
can't say the same for many of the table/cart.
manufactures & vendors.

I'm not familiar with the model of TT that you have, but many mass-market designs typical of the era will display problems like wiggly tonearm bearings, motor rumble, platter resonances, bouncy suspensions, and susceptability to coloration, mistracking, noisiness and feedback in general (especially if they're changers). You may want to take it to a TT specialist for an assessment of its condition and potential before starting down a road with it. It would be a shame if your foray back into analog were disappointed by the wrong tool for the job - peoples' audio expectations have been raised a lot since the time some of these "oldies (maybe not goldies)" were made. Who knows, yours may be worth working with, but there were reasons Linn came out with the LP12!

I started with a Nad pp1 and a simple Linn LP-12 with my Premier 14 . Vinyl sounded so musical that I upgraded to a Linn Lp-12 with Lingo and a Sonic Frontiers Sig One Phono section which is a steel at the going price of $750-1000.
Try the audiophile vinyl issues They sound great . Your CD will get a little dusty for a while !

Pops I had one of those Philips TT's way back in the day & had a lot of fun with it. However I agree that it's not really worth investing a great deal into it, as there's better product available now even at the economy level. Careful cartridge selection is necessary in order to successfully mate with that low mass arm; a high-compliance moving magnet or moving iron (the Grado deisgn) economy cartridge would certainly make sense here.