Goldring 1042 or Rega Exact

Your weak link is the turntable. Don't waste your money on a new cartridge. The glass and particle board TT's are touted as *audiophile* decks but when matched to a good digital rig they don't stand a chance. Main reason is their unacceptable speed/rotational stability, with vibration being a close second. Hear it in the attack and decay of percussion instruments. In your digital rig the attack will be fast, tight, well located in space and the decay wil be linear. In your Rega the attack will sound slow, blurry and the decay will waver. Get a CD & LP copy of something like Santana and listen to what I'm telling you...

Psychicanimal,you are correct when you say the weak link is the turntable,but there are ways around this.Firstly check the speed with a downloadable strobe from Extreme Phono's site.Planar 3's are usually 1-2% fast.To correct this, 2 equal spliced... length's of electrical tape wound around the rim of the sub-platter to widen it, cures this.Mine works fine.Experiment with the number of layers,testing with the strobe,and trim it.As regards a cartridge,both those MM's do not have a high enough frequency response.The Sumiko Blue Point Special or Denon 103 is ideal in this price range,if you can get a step-up or phono stage for MC.The Ortofon X5-MC is High Output MC and can be used in the existing stage.The platter can be easily replaced with an acrylic one,either bought off the web or you can have it machined cheaper.This table can go up against a $10,000 digital front-end when set-up right.stefanl

Stefan, such a light platter relying on AC speed regulation cannot counter static and dynamic stylus drag forces. Music will not sound right. Sorry...

I do use a form of mains power filtering I must admit, and have sat for some time with a stopwatch counting revolutions.My table deviates maybe, by about 3/10ths of a second per minute,perhaps with stylus drag it is right on spec.as the strobe looks absolutely rock-solid when I play a record.Rega believes 1-2% variation is ok.I hear more than about 1%??I saw somewhere the flywheel effect was the reason for the glass platter,but many companies market the acrylic version which is lighter, commercially,and I hear a better resolution from my machined acrylic one.Next week I will get a bigger one made to 14mm and play without a mat.A Conti of Bluenote Tables likes acrylic for its neutral character.There might be a trade-off but I think less resonance is better.VTA is all important.Stefanl

Stefanl,

A. Conti of Bluenote 'tables????

AFAIK, AJ Conti is of Basis 'tables & Mauricio Azerini (spelling?) is of Bluenote 'tables.

BTW, I don't know that Basis made acrylic platters! None of them look like acrylic to me but I could be wrong!