Turntable help Please

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.

Thanks everyone - great advice. Right now I'm searching for 90% of my old albums - they might have been lost in a move 4 years ago - I'm gonna be pissed!

Pops, Do yourself a favor and toss the old table. One of the more recent AR's is a big improvement over that one.....
I would suggest a Rega planar 2 used. Should be able to get it for around 200.00 with arm and there is very little to set up on it.
Going with the Rega cart....(are they still available??) is a good thing.
Under 500.00 and you are 90% of the way to an analog set costing 6,000.00 :>)