Heartland

Coming back to the discussion in the Damage Done thread in the Trading Section, I wonder which (analogue) equipment we're all using to play our Sisters vinyl records

My current equipment is:

Turntable - Technics 1200 mk5, currently in process update to a Transrotor
CD Player- Burmester 001
Amplifier - Burmester 877 mk2 / 956 mk2 (pre-/power-amplifier)

I'm curious, to get to know your hardware

I'm afraid I'm a typical quiquagenarian technophobe who is impressed by and slightly jealous of all the technical chat on HL.
I only ever play TSOM on CD (most days on my commute) and stream the live and rarer stuff on YouTube. I have no digital files, iTunes, Spotify etc and haven't owned a turntable since around 1990. I doubt if I have played my own copy of DD since 1985 !
Am not proud of this but am too old/busy to do anything about it.

turntable- Numark TT-100
amplifier- Technics SU-VZ220
speakers- Goodmans Studio Pro 100

all out of the ark but from manufacturers whose stuff lasts. a bit of switch cleaner wouldn't go a miss on the amp but otherwise fine.

Hmm. You just reminded me that I have a technics sl j90 (broken) lying about somewhere.
So I found it, and plugged it into the amp and as I thought, still broken
I thought it was just the belt that was buggered, so I took the platter off and apparently the belt was the only thing that actually was in (roughly) the right place.
So I took it apart, and I've just spent the last hour just taking all the parts, looking at them, putting them in places that they fit, moving them again, testing it to see if it spins, etc.
IT'S ALIVE! I actually fixed it. Bare in mind I have no technilogical know-how what so ever. Really proud of myself
But there are two parts left over. A big spring and a two pronged little 3 inch plastic rod. Oops.

So I took the reptile house from my collection, put it on the platter mat, turned it on...
the bluumin needle's broke
http://www.stylusplus.co.uk/technics-sl ... 1498-p.asp Is that a good price for a stylus? My previous record players have all been modern and come from factory so I have never had to buy one before...

My turntable is a Marantz (I think) - can't remember the model number; I got it second hand.
Amp is a Cambridge Audio AM5 (a recent investment)
Speakers are Gale Gold Monitors
I've got some fairly chunky speaker cables but I'm not the sort of idiot to pay hundreds of quid for interconnects.

All equipment other than the turntable has come from Richer Sounds.

markfiend wrote: I've got some fairly chunky speaker cables but I'm not the sort of idiot to pay hundreds of quid for interconnects.

The interconnects are just the sort of thing you want to spend a bit more on (not hundreds).
The shiatty bits of bell-wire that component suppliers usually chuck in the box are instant bin fodder tbh.
They are your signal path (that sounded a bit "Danny-esque" didn't it?)

Oh I know that, I have a few sets of five- and ten-quid interconnects, but I'm not going to go and get a set of these for example

My bad, I didn't make that at all plain in my previous, did I?

I have a 1990 Aiwa stack which still all works great

Digitally, I have 6 Sonos units connecting into 2 X 3TB external hard drives for instant access to my offical music

I still buy at least half a dozen records a year but haven't listened to one for quite some time

Have to leave this here really.

Obligatory

no turntable here.
and there's no point to buy turntable for recently released vinyl - album are mostly recorded on digital equipment, so there's not different sound betwix CD and vinyl; but of course if you got old albums there is a different.

If we're talking digital media, well...

I have a cheap, quiet, small-form-factor PC sitting next to the TV with (currently) 1.5TB of storage*, running XBMC on top of an Arch Linux base system. This has most of my DVDs and CDs ripped to it. (Not to mention *ahem* evaluation copies of a few things that have fallen off the back of a torrent *ahem*).

The PC feeds into the analogue sound-system (via aforementioned £5 interconnects) for hi-fi stereo sound (I haven't upgraded to 5.1 or 7.1 because frankly the size of our living room doesn't seem to me to be worth the effort... or worth all the cable-runs strewn about the place And come to think of it, most of the time I downsize my DVD rips to just stereo audio anyway.)

*500GB internal HD plus 1TB USB HD, both of which are nearly full. I'll need another terabyte or so before I start ripping more media. *sigh*

Edit: Oh yeah, the TV gets its signal from the media PC via a £5 HDMI cable (and you can buy outrageously expansive HDMI cables too) and from the Cable TV box via SCART. I don't even have a standalone DVD player at the moment.

As I've been doing some DJ-ing in the last 20 years, there's the one turntable that's always there wherever you go and it almost never fails: the classic SL 1200's...

so I bought a 2nd hand one myself, it was 10 years old at the time and it's the Technice SL1200 MK2. I've also got a Gemini PT-1000, but it's the Technice that is used all the time. I have a Kenwood amplifier, but since we moved to this place 7 years ago we use the wife's Pioneer SX205RDS and Audio Pro Stage 5 speakers.
No high-end stuff, but I'm no audiophile so very happy with this set-up basically.

Rega Planar 3 with Linn K9 cartridge
Rega amp
Arcam Alpha 7 CD player
Acoustic Energy speakers

Nothing less than 20 years old I think!

Turntable: Pro-Ject Essential
Amplifier: Yamaha DSP590
Speakers: m*****n M74 (bi-wired)
CD Player: Marantz CD6004
CD Recorder: Sony RCD-W100
Cassette Deck: Yamaha KX-393
Tuner: TU-260L

Some of this kit is quite modern some was bought in the same century that the Sisters last released an LP.

Turntable: Technics SL-1210MK2
Cartridge: Ortofon 2M Red
Digital Front End: Technics SL-PS670A CD Player
Amplification: Technics SU-V3
Headphone System: AKG K550
Speaker System: Wharfedale Diamond II
Speaker Cables: Cambridge Audio Symphony 400

Bartek wrote:and there's no point to buy turntable for recently released vinyl - album are mostly recorded on digital equipment, so there's not different sound betwix CD and vinyl; but of course if you got old albums there is a different.

That's debatable. For many listeners, a vinyl record is the most convenient transport of high-resolution digital recordings. Often, a dedicated vinyl master will be made (from high-resolution files) that will differ from the 16/44 CD master.

LyanvisAberrant wrote:Hmm. You just reminded me that I have a technics sl j90 (broken) lying about somewhere.
So I found it, and plugged it into the amp and as I thought, still broken
I thought it was just the belt that was buggered, so I took the platter off and apparently the belt was the only thing that actually was in (roughly) the right place.
So I took it apart, and I've just spent the last hour just taking all the parts, looking at them, putting them in places that they fit, moving them again, testing it to see if it spins, etc.
IT'S ALIVE! I actually fixed it. Bare in mind I have no technilogical know-how what so ever. Really proud of myself
But there are two parts left over. A big spring and a two pronged little 3 inch plastic rod. Oops.

So I took the reptile house from my collection, put it on the platter mat, turned it on...
the bluumin needle's broke
http://www.stylusplus.co.uk/technics-sl ... 1498-p.asp Is that a good price for a stylus? My previous record players have all been modern and come from factory so I have never had to buy one before...

That stylus you linked to should work fine with the J90. If the cartridge is removable, and VTF/VTA can be adjusted, I'd recommend getting a different cartridge with an elliptical stylus, it'll give you better sound reproduction than the conical one.