"Jim H" wrote in message
news

Ok, but I doubt we can do that much on my budget. The tt is a Technics SL-
Q33. Its direct drive and quartz controlled, it seems to spin at perfect
speed from the strobes.

I got this deck for £30 2nd hand, electronically fine but in need of work.
First up, the interconnects were going rusty! so I chopped an IXOS mono
lead in half and soldered the 'middle' bits into the tt. Problem solved!
Then there was no cueing. Turned out to just be a badly decayed band,
couldn't find a spare used a normal rubber band. The biggest problem was
cart/stylus - the stylus was actually bent 90°! Looking up the difficult
to
find stylus was the worst £20 I ever spent, I should have known the cart
was knackered. I've now got an unknown red Audio Technica cart that sounds
much better, but is likely still the weakest point in the system.

Its plugged into the phono input of an integrated amp. I'll maybe get a
seperate preamp one day.

Hope you can help. Some of my records are new, but most of the older ones
are a bit scratched. I've got some great stuff - original Floyd, K.U.K.L,
big pile o' jazz. The biggest problem is that the sound seems confined,
but
the system seems to handle jazz better than anything else.

I originally bought a turntable to just play my records on. I'm sceptical
that it will outperform cd, but hopeful that it might.

I would thoroughly recommend adding a phono preamp. My 13yr-old deck has
survived a long period of toddler and "dusting" abuse - many broken stylii
(and a downgraded cartridge) later I've added a preamp and it sounds better
than ever. Don't know whether it outperforms CD though, it all depends on
how good the recording is. I do have a couple Blue Note releases on both CD
and Vinyl, well recorded on both formats and its very difficult to tell the
difference!

Mike F