Investing in a Turntable

Jawa

Last week I went over to my friends House and to my surprise his dad had an old turntable. I instantly fell in love with it and now im thinking of investing in my own.
Now my question is where to start? I understand im going to need 2 tables ,some records,and a mixer, is there anything else i will need?

Also I'm on a pretty low budget so I want to get some stuff cheap what can I go cheap on?

Any other info would be appreciated

JWFokker

I would give you advice, but I thought this would be about using a turntable for high fidelity audio, not DJing.

Feral

Your standard workhorse turntables are Technics SL-1200s. You can often find older ones used for $200-300 a piece. The only reason not to buy them is if you're irrationally allergic to eBay and you can't find any in your local Craigslist. If you absolutely, positively must buy something else, make sure it's a direct-drive and not a belt-drive.

You're going to want slipmats, but you can pick those up at any record or music store that caters to DJs. You might even be able to get them from whoever sells you the turntables.

Regarding the mixer, a shitty mixer is better than none at all if you're first starting out. (If you're going to skimp, skimp on the mixer, not on the turntables.) Cheaper mixers produce poorer sound quality, but you usually only notice it once you're hooked into a PA and you have the volume up. You may also get noise when manipulating the crossfader. But, again, you're just learning, right? You can upgrade later. At the minimum you want a 3-band EQ, crossfader, and the ability to mix into headphones. Other features on higher-end mixers include: kill-switches on the EQ (allowing you to instantly kill a band), additional inputs (for a laptop computer if you want to bring MP3s or looping software into the mix, or down the road for additional turntables or CD players), and beatcounters. I don't recommend relying on the beatcounter - on low-end mixers they can be inaccurate, and counting beats is a skill you should be learning for yourself.

Regarding brands of mixers, I have no opinion. I've heard a lot of shit talked about every brand, and I've heard almost every brand talked up as being great for newbies or whatever (except maybe Radio Shack, but that goes without saying).

Also invest in a good quality pair of headphones. Sonys are almost always overpriced; I'd go with Sennheiser or Berhinger. One of the many, many musicians on the board might have more ideas about good headphones.

supabeast

Urban Outfitters sells cheap portable turntables.

Jawa

Feral wrote:

Your standard workhorse turntables.......

Do you happen to know a good place to learn or tutorials to learn from just to get started or should i just play around on it and learn things myself?

Feral

Jawa wrote:

Feral wrote:

Your standard workhorse turntables.......

Do you happen to know a good place to learn or tutorials to learn from just to get started or should i just play around on it and learn things myself?

I don't DJ. I just used to do setup and teardown for clubs and raves a while back, so I absorbed a lot of tech talk.

But every DJ I've ever talked to about it learned just by screwing around and ruining a lot of vinyl. Most of the time they had somebody who kind of mentored them, but it was really just a lot of trial and error.