Can someone help me with a first time turntable setup?

In that price range, how about a USB turntable?

If you have more to spend (a lot more) then you can get a serious turntable and a pro mixer that has turntable equalization and digitization (e.g. Roland DN-X400 ,+ your computer will need an optical input to connect to this one).

Like most audio gear, the most critical components are the transducers that convert between mechanical and electrical energy. So besides good speakers or headphones for listening, you want a turntable with a good cartridge & stylus. The cartridge is what actually converts the wiggles of the stylus, riding in the groove, into an electrical signal.

Good turntables typically have a heavy & well-balanced platter. Ideally the tracking force (i.e., the weight of the tonearm pressing down on the groove) is adjustable—typically between 1 and 1.5 grams. The better ones have what’s called anti-skate adjustments to balance the sideways forces as well.

Any turntable should have built-in RIAA equalization, meaning that the frequency response is matched to an industry standard. (When they record vinyl, they cut the low frequencies so the grooves don’t get too wide; this has to be reversed during playback.)

In your price range you might not get to be too choosy. I’d say get what you can afford, get it working, then think about upgrading turntables – or at least the cartridge – as funds become available.

In the old days there were scales and gauges that measured the tracking weight as well as the skating force. I was downstairs looking for mine to send you (on loan of course) Alignment of the diamond shouldn’t be a problem as the only problem might be phasing between right and left that are imperceptible, In the field without gauges, try setting the tracker to 0 and see if the arm will stay where you put it, adjust the skate so it also stays where you put it. (if anything when you bounce it up and down a eensy bit of creep inward isn’t a terrible thing. Set the downforce to around 1.25 and see how that sounds, adjust up and down not to exceed 2 grams.

I would suggest a separate turntable if you want to play 78’s. They require an entirely different setup and needles.

@dabbler
Thanks for the suggestion, but I already have a fairly well established home entertainment system with pretty nice speakers that I’d like to hook it up to.

@gasman
I will most likely do what you suggest in your last line. Would it make sense to buy a somewhat inexpensive turntable and then immediately upgrade the cartridge and/or stylus?

Oh, and another thing, I’m not exactly sure on how turntables make grooves on plastic into music, much less what the cartridge does. Could you explain this component and how one would go about upgrading it? Thanks for the advice!

The cartridges look like these and usually include the stylus, which is a microscopic diamond at the tip of a small metal cantiliver arm. Wiggles in the vinyl groove are transmitted up into the body of the cartridge, which houses little wire coils and permanent magnets that move past each other. By Faraday’s Law of induction, electricity is generated.

The system is cleverly engineered so the stylus moves in two perpendicular axes, generating two independent electrical signals we call left and right. A high-fidelity (20–20kHz) stereo audio signal gets encoded into the vinyl by pressing.

I should modify my earlier advice. Upgrading the cartridge of a low-quality turntable is like putting a racing engine into a rusty old car; “lipstick on a pig.” Some turntables are / used to be / too cheap to maintain a perfectly constant rpm, to apply the proper tracking forces & angles, to use low-noise electronics, to isolate the pick-up from outside room noise, etc. Fortunately good vinyl playback equipment still survives (you’d think it would be as rare as Betamax)) thanks to “scratching” effects used by dj’s. Who’d a thunk it?

As for 78 rpm records, many of which were not vinyl, I agree with @majorrich about a separate setup. I would no sooner play a 78 on my good turntable than I would play a sanding disk—probably with similar effect on the equipment! Fortunately stereo turntables don’t normally have 78 settings. (Has that changed?)

@wds2 Your “well established home entertainment system” might have an amp with a phono input. If not then you’re out of luck in the equalization department, you need that. If you have that then that takes care of the phono equalization.

It is less likely to have a good digitizer, so you need something to convert the analog signals into one of those handy formats listed in the original question.

If you have both of those then spend the budget on the best turntable you can find for the money with no built-in digitizers or other frills.

Frankly, unless you’re really going to go nuts with cleaning the disks and later editing pops and noise out of the digitized files, a middle-of-the-road USB turntable seems like a good option to me.

@dabbler My stereo does not have a phono input. Would something like this be good for what I’m looking for? I’m pretty sure it has a built-in preamp and it can digitze into the formats I am want. I know it isn’t exactly top of line, but it falls in my budget and it seems good to me. Also, it can play at 78 rpms, but (as all of you have advised), I likely won’t use this feature, at least not at first. Like i said, pretty new to this. Your help with a first time tunrtable user is greatly appreciated.

That looks like a good choice. Audio-Technica make good quality turntables and with their direct-drive that is a definite cut above the cheaper USB turntables.
I would expect the pre-amp/equalization/USB components to be quite competent.

The USB output (plugged into a computer) is what you need for digitization.
And the “line-level RCA output cables” are ready to plug into any free (e.g.“aux”) input on your amp, the equalization is done for you in the built-in pre-amp.

I agree with @dabbler.

Thanks a lot guys! I look forward to buying this (probably in a few weeks, when I’ve made some more money for it) and building up my vinyl collection. I’m new to the fluther community and I appreciate your assistance. I may come back if he need more help with this issue.