Beginning the Analog Adventure

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.

A record cleaning machine is important and you can save money purchasing a manual unit as opposed to an automatic. Your records will not be any cleaner with an automatic. However, a good turntable, arm, and cartridge upgrades your analog system significantly more than a record cleaning machine. That is irrefutable.

Judy426 is right. The extra money you spend on a RCM is for convenience. As long as it sucks, it's as good as the rest. Unless you get into the freaky expensive stuff.

You could really improve things for very little money by building your own RCM. It will be every bit as good as a 16.5 and probably won't set you back more than $50 bucks. IMHO, once you decide on which cleaning solutions and brushes work best for you it is the vacuuming that makes the difference with record cleaning. At least until you get to the level of a Loricraft.

Based on my experience I would have to agree with others that your best move right now is to buy vinyl and develop a cleaning method that works well for you. But if you develop an itch that you just can't scratch then look for a tubed phono stage first. Something like used EAR 834P, Hagerman, etc. You'll be amazed how much your Music Hall will like tubes and you should be able to sell it for about what you paid for it. Anything more and you will get into that space where you would be better off just plunking down the bucks and upgrading on more of a major scale. But this is a hobby and so it is up to you to decide if you want to make a big jump or perhaps pay a bit more of a price in time and money to enjoy the journey by learning what each little change can make. (Here I will say that the 2.1 is limiting what you can do/learn with TT/tonearm/cartridge setup.) There are pluses and minuses to both paths, it's up to you. Have fun and enjoy!

Dan