The more pedantically minded among you who regularly read my work will no doubt look at the headline of this story and think, “Wait, has it really been a year since Dennis got his first proper grown-up turntable?” It has not. In fact, it’s only been about eight months.
But it has been a year or so since I committed to finding my perfect first ’table, and given that I’m sitting here close to the dawn of a new year, feeling all reflective and stuff, I’ve been thinking about what I might change if I could roll the calendar back and do it over again from scratch. And, just as importantly, what I would do exactly the same. Let’s start with that last one first.
What I got right: buying the U-Turn Orbit Theory turntable
This is a question I get a lot for whatever reason, mostly from the people who helped me with buying advice when I was deciding which turntable to buy. Did the Theory end up being the right turntable for me? Funnily enough, the question comes more frequently from people who gave me well-meaning advice about why I might not vibe with the U-Turn, mostly its lack of automatic or even semi-automatic operation and its limited setup options. “You’re going to get tired of rushing over to your system to lift the needle as soon as it reaches the runout grooves,” one of them told me. “You can’t adjust the anti-skate yourself!” another warned.
I can see why both points might be concerning for some old vinyl heads, for sure. But the fact that the setup wasn’t too complicated was (and is) a plus for me, and the fact that I have to physically interact with the Theory so much has, I think, been one of the things that made me see the light on the whole vinyl experience.
I’ve rarely vibed with a piece of gear this hard. Aside from the stupid acrylic dustcover that is a bugbear of all turntables I know of—seriously, why does this foul material scratch and scuff and cloud up so easily?—the Theory is a joy to touch, to play with, to tinker with, to watch as my records spin. Lifting and lowering the one-piece magnesium OA3 Pro tonearm is a pleasurable tactile experience on par with having a pair of scissors glide through a piece of giftwrap paper smoothly and cleanly in one go. The walnut plinth is also a feast for the senses. I honestly think if I’d spent anywhere near $1000 on any turntable other than the Theory, I would have had some buyer’s remorse.
What I might’ve done differently: start with a cheaper entry-level turntable
All that said, during my first few weeks with the Theory, I felt like a middle-aged virgin hooking up with a supermodel. I was terrified of “doing it wrong,” of setting it up incorrectly, of damaging my records, of borking the cartridge. That last one might have been a consequence of the fact that it seems like every other vinyl-related post on Reddit is from someone asking if their stylus is cooked, only for the answer to be affirmative. But still, the anxiety is real.
I honestly kinda think I should have started with an inexpensive-but-acceptable-quality turntable that I wouldn’t have been so precious with while learning the ropes. That would have served two purposes. Firstly, since I got my turntable, my wife is itching to have her own system in her office, once we have room in the budget. But she doesn’t want anything nearly so nice as the Theory.
Make no mistake: the Theory was always going to be my endgame turntable, I think. But if I’d started with a less-precious piece of kit, I could have learned the ropes, gotten over my fears, and then passed the entry-level player over to my wife and approached the flagship U-Turn with much more confidence.
But which starter player would I have gotten? Again, I’d be torn between buying a piece of gear made in my home country and buying one from a local small business. The U-Turn Orbit Basic would be perfect for my wife’s purposes and would have been great training wheels for me, especially given its upgradability. But I honestly think I would have let buy-local win over buy-locally-made and gotten something like the Audio-Technica AT-LP60X, which is always in stock at Classic Audio & Records up the road from me.
What I did right: figured out that paper sleeves are crap
As I demonstrated in my review of the Record Doctor X, paper inner sleeves are the devil. The first thing I did with the couple of new records I got for Christmas that came in paper inners was to cut them apart and extract the record without sliding it against that pulpy mess. I did take the opportunity to stick one of the sleeves under the microscope before throwing it away, though, and this did as much as anything I could do to illustrate why the things are just unacceptable in every way.
Keep in mind, that jagged edge you’re seeing isn’t a torn edge; it’s the seemingly perfectly straight edge of the opening of a paper sleeve. Just look at all those fibers waiting to slough off and get stuck in the grooves of your records. It’s standard policy now that I don’t dare play a record that has come out of paper sleeves without first wet-cleaning it and then putting it in a poly-lined inner.
What I wish I’d done sooner: upgrade to better outer sleeves
While outer sleeves mostly only exist to protect the jacket of a record (and maybe the obi strip), I ran into some issues early on with the bog-standard outers that are sold in pretty much every record shop. Mainly, there was the fact that they wouldn’t fit a few of my records, specifically the Rhino High-Fidelity release of American Beauty, my RSD exclusive Buena Vista Social Club, along with a couple of other double-gatefold packages.
Someone recommended Sleeve City’s Deluxe Oversized Ultimate Outer 5.0, which turned out to be perfect size-wise. What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with the 5-mil polypropylene so much that I ordered some standard Ultimate Outer 5.0s to house the rest of my meager collection.
You can see the difference here. I bought both records on the same day. The Gil Scott-Heron / Brian Jackson record went directly into a Deluxe Oversized Ultimate Outer 5.0, whereas the Parliament LP went into a standard 2.5-mil sleeve, because it fit. They’ve been played roughly equally, and look how crisp and clean the Sleeve City sleeve looks by comparison to the wrinkled, occluded, cloudy, translucent mess that the standard sleeve has become in just a few months.
Mind you, the Parliament record’s standard outer sleeve technically did its job of protecting the jacket. But it is getting re-sleeved as we speak. The point is, having these thick, glossy sleeves is an unexpected pleasure for me. My records look better in the cheesy “Now Playing” stand I bought against all my better judgment (in truth, I kinda love it, but I just hate being such a social-media cliché). But more importantly, these thick, glossy, perfectly transparent sleeves simply feel better sliding in and out of my shelves. And for a hobby that’s so focused on the tactile experience, that matters for me.
What I got right: fighting dust
One of the first thoughts that occurred to me when SoundStage! Network founder Doug Schneider encouraged me to add vinyl playback to my reference system was that I would have to get much more diligent about dusting. Seriously, that’s just how my brain works.
Thank goodness for that. I managed to get a rather astonishing deal on an air purifier for my office, which turns out to have enough capacity to cycle the air in the entire back half of my house. The effects on my health have been appreciable, and I now have to change the hypoallergenic filters in my CPAP machine once every three months instead of once a month. Sinus infections have plummeted, allergies weren’t nearly as much of an issue this autumn, and best of all, it turns out I actually have to dust less than I did before. And, oh yeah, my records appreciate it, too.
What I should’ve done sooner: combat static
The sad fact of the matter, though, is that despite my best efforts to eradicate the stuff, any stray bit of dust that did remain in my two-channel listening room invariably ended up on my records at some point during their playback.
So I quickly began researching how to get rid of static charges. I started by replacing the felt mat that came with my turntable with an open-cell silicone foam mat, which helped a lot. I also picked up an anti-static carbon-fiber brush from my friendly local record shop. That also made some improvements, but I still found that on dry days, when I’d come to the end of a record and reach for it to flip it or file it, my hands would encounter that telltale invisible fuzz that I knew would be there, since I’d heard a few too many pops and clicks during the last song on that side.
I was chatting about that one day with reader Clay Anderson, and he mentioned that he’d purchased an anti-static gun back in the 1960s, and he’d be happy to let me play around with it—or even purchase it from him for what he paid over five decades past, which to the best of his recollection was somewhere in the neighborhood of $20. Since the things sell for upwards of $100 these days, I jumped at the opportunity, if only so I could say with confidence that these things are stupid.
And to my absolute shock, it’s been the best record accessory I’ve purchased to date. Seriously. A few very slow squeezes of the trigger before playing each side of a record, and I can get through a clean LP without a single pop or click. This thing works so well that my wife occasionally tries to steal it to de-stat our pillowcases when they come out of the dryer. I’ve had to calmly explain to her that this is a 50-year-old mechanical device with a limited number of uses (Milty, maker of the popular Zerostat 3 antistatic gun, says you can expect it to last for about 50,000 squeezes). But when this old Empire Static Eliminator kicks the bucket, I’ll be finding room in the budget for a replacement as soon as Wookieely possible.
What I did right: make my local record store my top priority
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the best part about having a record player is that it sort of feels like a very important (but frankly somewhat optional) guest pass to the coolest club I’ve ever been part of. That would be Village Green Records, my local music shop. Owner Travis Harvey has done more than anyone else to ease me into this new hobby, help me learn the ropes, and ensure I get more enjoyment out of my pitiful little record collection. Buying a record from him always feels like a satisfying shot of serotonin, whereas the couple of new records I’ve purchased online just felt like fleeting dopamine hits.
He also gets my musical taste in a way that no algorithm ever will. Within a few months of meeting him, I was getting personalized recommendations that really resonated, turning me onto some of my favorite new music again and again with a startling success rate.
One day, when I was hanging out in his shop, I asked him about an album whose cover looked particularly intriguing. “Not your thing, I don’t think. But I know what you would dig. Hang on.” He promptly dug out a used-but-pristine copy of Caspian’s Waking Season and said something to the effect of, “This is the kind of ambient post-rock stuff you eat up.”
Do I? Do I really like ambient post-rock? As it turns out, I do. Mogwai and 65daysofstatic are bands I could listen to all day long without tiring of them, and I wouldn’t kick Sigur Rós out of bed, either. I just never really thought of them belonging under a single unified umbrella, and no streaming service has ever picked up on the fact that this whole aesthetic just works for me. But Travis did, without even trying, and he’s also turned me onto some truly weird shit I never would have heard of otherwise whose genres don’t even make sense.
Photo by Geoffrey Morrison
What’s more, he’s been instrumental in teaching me to stop treating records like collectible items and start treating them like music. When I got my turntable, one of the first things I did was sign up for a Discogs account so I could start cataloguing my collection. During that process, I discovered that an old Polyphonic Spree holiday record I’d literally purchased from lead singer Tim DeLaughter’s own hands at a show in Birmingham sells for upwards of $200 these days.
I mentioned that to Travis, and his immediate response was, “How does it sound?”
Wait. What? Sound? As if I would drag a rock through the ditches of a piece of PVC worth $200? Come on. Grow up. This thing is wall art and nothing more. Or so I thought.
“Let me show you something,” he said with that wicked grin I’ve learned to recognize as the sign of an impending revelation. “This is the rarest record I’ve ever had in my shop,” he said whilst holding the timeworn cover for something called Felt. “It was recorded by a 17-year-old kid in Huntsville, Alabama, who signed a copy for his music teacher. I picked it up at an estate sale. Every time I’ve seen it sell, it went for $1000 easily. I don’t think I’ll sell it for quite that much, though.”
I marveled at such an artifact and asked him to turn it over so I could see the signature. He handed me the damned jacket as if I were a responsible adult or something.
“Wanna listen to it?”
“Sure!” I said, assuming he was going to pull it up on Apple Music or Spotify or what have you. Instead, he pulled the record out of the sleeve, dropped it on his shop ’table, and absolutely blew my mind with some of the coolest psychedelic rock I’ve heard in ages. We listened to the whole damned album. And at some point, he winked at me and said, “If it weren’t for the music in those grooves, this would be a worthless piece of plastic. Records are made to be listened to, man. Don’t ever forget that.”
I eventually picked up a more recent repressing of Felt for like $13, and I spin it quite regularly. But more importantly, when the Christmas season rolled around this year, I opened my original red pressing of the Spree’s Holidaydream: Sounds of the Holidays Vol. One and dropped the stylus on it without a moment’s hesitation.
What I wish I’d done sooner: embrace original pressings
Typically, I can make room for one new record a month in my budget, but that doesn’t keep me from lurking at the record shop anyway, just for the opportunity to talk about music with people who love it as much as I do. The thing is, though, most of the records at Village Green are pre-loved. And at first, I could barely handle the distortions of vinyl even on a pristine copy, much less anything with a scratch or three in it.
But one day, while hanging out at the shop, I started to feel guilty about not spending money, despite the fact that I’d already bought my one record for the month. Then I came across a lovely original pressing of Cat Stevens’s Teaser and the Firecat, which stood out to me because of its canvas-textured, matte-finish jacket. There’s also the fact that the album contains one of my all-time favorite tunes, “The Wind.”
I asked Travis if he wouldn’t mind giving the record a spin for me, which he gladly did. And it sounded really lovely, with nary a scratch to be heard. The price was right—eight bucks, if memory serves—and I decided I could justify the expense by walking to my local YMCA for the rest of the week instead of driving to save money on petrol.
Fast-forward three weeks, and I had not only exceeded my steps goals by a lot; I had also come home with lovely original pressings of Catch Bull at Four and Buddha and the Chocolate Box, which I think I paid $7 and $5 for, respectively.
Photo by Geoffrey Morrison
Sadly, Tea for the Tillerman eluded me, and I eventually gave up and made the 2024 reissue my new record for the month one month. And it sounds fine, truly. No complaints. The psychosomatic effect that comes from owning and touching and playing those old original pressings just means more to me, whether they’re in perfect condition or not. Maybe it’s the imagined psychometry I mentioned previously—the historical weight of realizing that, decades past, somebody spun this platter in their own home while they danced or made love or just unwound from a long day at work. But that history—real or imagined—impacts the way I listen to those old records. And it’s something I wish I’d embraced a lot sooner.
Hell, if nothing else, it saves me a few precious pennies in the process, too, so long as I stay away from the highly collectible stuff I probably wouldn’t enjoy listening to anyway.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
