As others have noted, both Music Hall and Sumiko/Pro-ject have nice offerings at or below $500. I think the Music Hall 5 is right at the $500 price point, with arm and cartridge. The lower-end Rega tables might also sneak in under the $500 limit. I might not be remembering this right, but the arms on both Music Hall and Pro-Ject tables might be the same, or almost the same at comparable price points. It seems to me that these are Pro-Ject arms? Rega of course uses their own arms.
Speaking of old Thorens tables, I still have the old Dual turntable I bought in 1977, with a Shure V15. It's a belt-drive semi-auto table (meaning manual cueing to start play, but an automatic lift-off and power-off at the end. This came in handy in case of falling asleep while listening to that last record - no wearing out the inner groove! The tone arm is actually pretty nice, in my opinion. One somewhat unusual characteristic of the Dual tonearm from back then is that tracking force is applied by a little coil spring, rather than by unbalancing the mass of the arm/cartridge. Basically, the arm is balanced in all planes, then the tracking and anti-skating forces are applied via springs. As a result, the tracking force is always perpendicular to the plane of the record, regardless of whether the turntable is level, or tilted. With a record clamp to hold the record in place, you can play a record with the turntable on its side, or even upside down, for that matter. The cueing still works, too. Not that there is any practical value to this - it's just an amusing thing to try out.
