Thank you for the suggestions. I will research them in more detail tonight.
So the first guy said go vintage. Which I assume means go with a "new style" tube type receiver? Which advantages would that give me?
Verdinut suggested going with an receiver with built in phono. I noticed that receiver has Bluetooth, WiFi, both of which i don't need or want. also, the 24-bit/192kHz high res playback....that seems low to me. Doesn't it go as high as 350~? Higher end receivers even have built in DAC's no?
Let's take the cost of the turntable out of it. Im talking just sound. What's it gonna take to build a reputable stand alone vinyl listening system?
Well you can build one with junk or the good stuff.
I agree you do not need a receiver and I think it would be a detriment.
What you do need to understand is the difference between digital and entirely mechanical analog systems.
The issue is that a budget CD player will sound close to or even as good as an expensive one.
This does not hold for turntables and cartridges. As you wisely select higher end well designed turntables and cartridges there is a chasm of difference in performance over budget offerings.
From what you are wanting cheaper budget offerings should not be considered.
For a good starter turntable and cartridge $600 to $700 is what you are looking at.
As far as electronics, the demand for good simple units that I think you are looking for have shrunk so cost has risen.
In the electronics end I would seriously look at good vintage equipment. One of the big problems with vinyl, is that some LPS are excellent but most are not and need some degree of taming, especially in the high frequency spectrum.
The best vintage equipment was designed to deal with this.
In this regard I strongly recommend Quad equipment made by the Acoustical Manufacturing Company.
These preamps have the ability to precisely match to a wide variety of cartridges and in the QUAD 44 the cartridge loading capacitance and the lead capacitance. With the small voltages produced by phono cartridges these details matter. In addition QUAD preamps provide excellent facilities for making high frequency distortion so prevalent on the inside grooves less objectionable.
So you need to select good very neutral speakers and avoid and bright or harsh speakers like the plague.
I have a nice Quad rig that I use for vinyl a lot in the winter.
Turntable is a vintage Thorens TD 125 Mk II, with SME series III pu arm and Shure xmr cartridge.
The preamp is a Quad 34 and the power amp a Quad 909. Speakers are my design and build.
In my main system I have
three vintage turntables each with its own preamp.
Lastly you may have been told that analog turntables provide better fidelity than digital sources like CD. This is not true. In the pop world many digital productions are ruined at birth so to speak, with atrocious mastering. These dynamically compressed masters can not be cut to vinyl. This is how the LPs come to sound better than the digital versions quite often.
However with proper mastering that is the rule in the classical world, then the digital version is almost always significantly better than the LP version.
