a leg plaster wrote:Something I have never thought or learned about: should I buy a turntable mat? I have seen cork, cowhide, acrylic, all sorts and colors. My turntable isn't exactly top of the line, but would acquiring one of these benefit me at all?Acrylic? That's likely a replacement/upgrade platter, not a mat.

I've never used a mat, so I wouldn't know. If you google mat, do you get any useful results? Even the Steve Hoffman forums have useful information here and there, not all SH members are corksniffing c***s.For instance, one of the first hits for my turntable gave the following:http://vinylengine.com/turntable\_forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=64175&start=30 wrote:I have the VPI corkmat on my p3-24 and love it and it's cheap.

Here's one going the other direction. I'm looking for a low budget, low footpring turntable that I can plug my headphones directly into. Doesn't need to sound AMAZING, but my ears work. For example, one of those Crosley things would be perfect but I've heard nothing but bad things from my friends.

I was about to pull the trigger on the Jensen but I'm sold on this. Please forgive my ignorance, but I wouldn't need an amplifier at all if I were to get the Audio Technica you've mentioned with a small mixer?

Thanks a bunch. This will be perfect. Was literally trying to justify the price of a small mixer just last night.

You aren't going to find a regular TT with a bulit in headphone jack, you'll have to go the all-in-one route. Most are junk but can do the job, got this for a friend's daughter as a gift and she's happy with it:http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BCA4116Obviously nothing even close to high end (or midrange) but you can do a lot worse for $45. If you really want to do it somewhat right and never need traditional speakers, getting a TT and a cheap headphone amp is your best bet.

Jensen JTA-230http://www.amazon.com/Jensen-JTA-230-St ... B00BCA4116

chrisc wrote:Here's one going the other direction. I'm looking for a low budget, low footpring turntable that I can plug my headphones directly into. Doesn't need to sound AMAZING, but my ears work. For example, one of those Crosley things would be perfect but I've heard nothing but bad things from my friends.The Jensen would be perfect, but it seems to me that they use the same or similarly cheap stylus the Crosleys do. Crosleys are no good. The styluses are extremely cheap, can potentially damage your records and are prone to skipping. Echoing Gantry's post, you may want to spend a little more and get one of the lower end Audio Technica tables and get a small mixer with RCA inputs and a phones out. Thats what I'd do. However, judging from the Amazon page for it, if you buy a brand new AT-LP60 you get 2 cables ("Includes: Two output adapter cables (dual RCA female to mini-plug male & dual RCA female to mini-plug female"), the latter of which you could plug phones into. the only issue would be controlling volume, which you can't do directly on the turntable itself. You could also just buy one of those stand alone phono preamps for hooking older turntables up to line level inputs. These are not expensive and usually have a phones out (however, the newer AT tables have built in pre-amps or are line level so I don't know if this would cause any sound issues and again, no volume control unless your headphones are capable of such, i.e. a volume control attached to the headphone cable itself). There are very bare-bones Behringer mixers with just a few channels that have RCA. This way you can control the volume. I got the vintage Realistic mixer pictured below for $20 or so at a pawn shop. Have seen them cheap on eBay as well. Has multiple phono ins and all that jazz. Having one of these would probably be handy if you like to fuck about with audio stuff.

chrisc wrote:I was about to pull the trigger on the Jensen but I'm sold on this. Please forgive my ignorance, but I wouldn't need an amplifier at all if I were to get the Audio Technica you've mentioned with a small mixer?Nope. The turntable has a built in switchable phono preamp, so you're all good there. For the price, I'd say the Audio Technicas are the highest quality entry level tables you can get and won't give you the hassles and issues of the cheaper models from other manufacturers. Also, having a mixer handy is nice, should you ever need one.

chrisc wrote:Thanks a bunch. This will be perfect. Was literally trying to justify the price of a small mixer just last night.Glad I could help, dude.