Beginning the Analog Adventure

I started out with a Music Hall MMF-5 and compared it (side by side) with a friend's Rega P-25, RB-900 tonearm, and Grado Platinum cartridge. While his setup did some things better, they both displayed many of the same limitations (and the Rega / Grado combination was worse in 2 distinct areas - pitch and hum). It wasn't until I got my Teres 255 / OL Silver / Shelter 501 mk II that I thought "Wow...this is *really* significant."

Like others have said, you'd be better off waiting.

Ok, I'll buck the trend here.

You should get quite a bump in performance by upgrading to something like used VPI HW, especially if you can get the Mk 4 version. You should be able to get one with arm within your budget.

Your budget does not allow a nice upgrade of both TT and phono, but you can at least do one and I would suggest the TT first.

If you can swing a soldering iron you could consider building a phono kit. The bottlehead Seduction is good value. You can also look at the Hagerman kits and my all time fav, the Audionote phono kit. They will cost a fraction of the commercially available phonos and IMHO leave them for dead.

Regards
Paul

Stapimp, It's great to see another one finding the sound value in analog reproduction. The Music Hall is a fine start, enjoy it and start saving. I would side with the majority in this case to recommend for a more substantial turntable. It's very important in time for you to hear for yourself the difference a better table could bring. If you can seek out an A/B comparison great, all other things being equal you will hear the better table for its musicality. I realize today that might be tough and you may do your research on the web only to buy based on others review or opinion. That's fine too. The inherent problem with upgrading cartridges, arms, and phono amps is that without a substantial table you cannot support these upgrades and will not hear the greatest bang for your buck. Fact is you may create more problems in the sound than you fix IMHO. In ’83 I went the extra mile and bought the better table and although all the other components in the system have been upgraded a couple of times the original turntable has supported quite adeptly these changes all for the betterment in sound quality. Keep buying those records and happy listening!

It sounds like your immediate plans are to buy a lot of vinyl (which shows you have your priorities straight). Perhaps you should invest your budget in a good record cleaning machine, cleaing fluids, new inner sleeves, and storage for your collection. This is an investment that will have an immediate pay off and will continue to pay off if and when you get a nicer table and cart. Have fun record shopping!

Yeah keep the music hall for now and get a VPI 16.5 cleaner, that will be a far bigger improvement to the music than dropping anything less than probably like stated above about 3000.00 into a new table and cart. Also, the Mobil fidelity inner sleves are the best anti static(rice paper type) poly whatever sleeves I have used after cleaning, they keep the vinyl sounding excellent for about a year till the next cleaning, those two non stereo components made the largest immediate strides in my case. I have a MMF7 with a Benz micro type cartridge, excellent... maybe I would buy a nottingham but really find this with silent cleaned albums much more than I needed to be happy.