New user phono question. Comes with free story.

I agree with ghdprentice. Digital and vinyl investments used to be almost equal about ten years ago. Now I find that one needs to invest about $4-5K if they want their vinyl to rival their $1-2K digital front end. Does that mean the digital front end at that investment performs exceptionally? Not at all, but it is easier and cheaper to get farther with digital than it is with vinyl. If you have limited budget and can deal without the sacrilegious rituals of flipping vinyl, I encourage you to do so.

I have tried to walk away from vinyl and have gotten awfully close in the past, but as Stingreen mentions, my setups too are now at a point where it depends on the production. Instead, I’ve slimmed down the vinyl that doesn’t make the cut.

Justin572,

You can slaughter the sound of standard digital music with vinyl, but for your budget, it would take careful choice of equipment. I am a music lover as well as an audiophile. We had a pioneer record player when i married over 40 years ago, yes I'm old, lol. When we jumped back into vinyl about a decade ago, we were given a vintage pioneer of similar quality. It had a $35 vintage cart on it. We owned a vintage Yamaha (year 2000) flagship amp with a built in MM phono preamp, so we were set to plug and play. It was great fun, finding vinyl gems for 25c at the flea markets. Our dvd/cd player in the system was a $500 (in 2000) Yamaha 5 disc player, but we loved the warmth of vinyl playback. You could hear the thinness of standard digital on the system. We had good quality speakers, and the Yamaha amp was $3k back in 2000. So our basic set up was no slouch. We were satisfied, for a while.

Fast forward to today, we learned about how to choose used records that were pristine, and we collected about 1800 records, most of which are audiophile pressings. You MUST clean used records if you want good playback, a spin clean and its matching record cleaning solution will cost about 100 dollars and will greatly help to clean up the sound of old records. We started with that and ended up buying a vacuum record cleaner when we upgraded other gear and started buying expensive pressings. When we would come across an especially dirty, but excellent record, we often start with the SpinClean, , then use the vacuum unit to finish the job.

So, read some reviews on your equipment, see what cartridges and amps  the reviewers say sound good with them, and go from there. With vintage, to get good sound, you need some synergy. If you have strident speakers, you might want a more forgiving amp that rolls off the top end. The speaker cables and interconnects are not generally neutral either until you are into the several hundred dollar range,  but choosing some decent cables to help adjust your sound toward neutral can help the music present better. We started with Radio shack wire and ended up with some neutral, high quality Tara labs, MIT and audioquest interconnects. We did upgrade speaker cables, and probably need to replace them again, but we found some vintage MIT-750 cables from a decade past (now 2 decades past) and bought them for our system to replace monster cables. Speaker cables that were maybe $1800 new, we got for $300 or so. So looking back a decade or so can help keep cost down. Rule of thumb, whatever your music set up costs, plan on spending 20% of that for cables.  Don’t buy $1000 cables for a $300 amp. But don’t buy $10 cables for an $800 amp either. Matching —back to synergy—will help. 

You have to decide if you are interested enough in vinyl to do the research, look for records, clean them; look for used gear that works well together. A mismatched turntable/cartridge/amp/preamp can sound awful, or the speakers and amp aren’t a good match—but if you like your digital playback then the speakers and amp are probably ok. whereas sometimes it only takes finding out which element is mismatched with the rest to adjust and get decent playback.

If you enjoy the process, pursue your vinyl. If you just want to push a button and listen to music, then let the vinyl go. Either way, it is the music that is important, however you like it.

Wow. That's a lot of very considered advice fast.  If digital really offers that much value, maybe I have to consider spending very judiciously on the vinyl and focus on getting the best out of one source.  I'm not ready to throw in the towel yet though, at least not without making sure the kit I have now is set up properly.

Dogberry, It is interesting that you mention checking the setup of the turntable first.  I didn't ask too many questions because I bought it from an old fella that was really more interested in telling stories than anything else, and I got a smokin' deal on it.  It would have felt rude to start grilling him over it.  On the way out the door he actually gave me a couple of EQs just because he had a stack of them and kinda had to thin them out.

Anyway, when I got home, I looked up the specs from sure and it is supposed to have about 1.25 grams of tracking force, but it was set at 2 grams.  I set it by the book.  I could try bumping the force back up, but I don't want to damage any vinyl. Would 2g of force have damaged the stylus?  I'll also check on the overhang and VTA.

Right now the sound is thin, lacking detail, and fatiguing.

deeelbee,

I think we were posting at the same time.  Funny coincidence - I am also using RadioShack RCA cables.  For speaker cables though, I have an old 14ga extension cord that I cut up.  I suppose that's not really audiophile grade, but it is very nice non-recycled copper.  I'm not against spending some money cables, I just don't think it is wise to do so before I have the major components of my system sorted out.

For record cleaning, all I have is a brush. I started looking at spin cleaners, vacuums, and ultra-sonics a few weeks ago.  I became overwhelmed with the noise of the internet trying to sell me stuff and gave up on it.

This is exactly how I imagined it would sound given the cheap table and mid-fi integrated with built-in phono amp.

Right now the sound is thin, lacking detail, and fatiguing.