Are Bang and Olufsen turntables any good?

I've never heard anything about B&O tables damaging vinyl.

You can get new cartridges for the B&O mount from Soundsmith. The Soundsmith cartridges have been very well received.

Of course there are better tables, but I think it would be fine for getting back into vinyl. You should probably get yourself a strobe disc to check the speed, and may also need a new belt (about $30).

http://www.beocentral.com/products/bg1700

b&o put more r&d into their tables than many of todays so called high end models, and with anew cartridge, they sound great. they are not 'tall' however, so there are sceptics.

I'd put a good matching cartridge in the beast as indicated by others and go with it. I suspect it will do quite well.

I'm using a Beogram 4500 with built in phono preamp and MMC-2 cartridge. Like jaybo says not as tall as some of todays models, but can hold it's own sonically. Pretty well engineered. According to Peter at Soundsmith the phono preamp design was well executed within the context of what was available during that time period and having to fit within a small foot print.

I worked at a store that sold B&O and we had a linear tracking Beogram as one of our source components, along with a Marantz 6300 with Fidelity Research MC cart w/Supex step-up transformer.

The B&O was pretty good and presented the meat of the music pretty well, but it's a bit light in the bass extension and rhythmic slam department as I remember them, especially next to a good DD turntable of the day. Their cartridges and Soundsmith's recreations of them are very good, and they don't hurt the records.

If you got a new Soundsmith cart for your B&O and later decided to upgrade the TT, I would think you could get a Soundsmith adapter to enable mounting the B&O style cart in a standard 1/2" spaced headshell.