The Great Turntable Hunt 2006

So "her indoors" wants to get together with her syblings and buy their aul fella a present. Being a dad, finally, I thought. here was a suggestion I could wholeheartedly support. This was naive. So what would be a good present. Well he likes music - none of your modern stuff oh no.. obscure vinyl (and not in a good way). Still you can't fault the man on his choice of format.

Right so what's the shopping list: We need a hifi system - something with turntable, radio, CD, and twin cassette deck (Note to IRMA - not to be used for copying tedious vinyl....only to be used for ....recording impromptu Ibsen plays, directed and performed by various guests to the house). It's a long time since I bought a hifi (he said smugly glancing over at the stack of ancient NAD goodies in the corner) and lots of people I know still buy vinyl so I was stupidly a little stunned to realise that the ugly great tower systems product category has ceased to exist. To be replaced with Mini and Micro. Do turntables exist on these things. Well they do - in the budget Alba and Goodmans have mini versions - 100 quid - so you can have what you want Father-In-Law provided what you want is cheap-soon-to-break-shit. Split 4 ways thats 25 quid each, hmm maybe a bit light.....

So what are the other options. Buy a mini/micro system with an aux input and buy a turntable. Well there are a couple of problems with this:

• Most systems don't have a aux input - boo. Although a very small number do.
  
• Of the very small number that do, most have the "hideous boy racer/he who dies with the most sub-woofers, tweeters and 3D Bass Boost thingamies wins" style disaster. Not that father-in-law is some form of style victim, no, but neither is he 13.
• One of the requirements is to tidy up the extended current set of jury-rigged near-sentient hifi cast-offs that have taken over a sidetable. And turntables just don't sit nicely on the subset of mini systems. Beside yes. Ontop no.

Checked Ebay - some tower systems (second-hand) still available in UK, but these fail under the too cheapo category.

So that leaves separates. So now we need to buy separate CD, radio, turntable, twin cassette deck amp and speakers - even a budget priced system will come in around 750 (Sony entry level system). So I guess this is WHAT-MUST-BE-DONE. Seems insane really that this is the only choice considering the previous ubiquity of tower/hifi systems.




It's a long (and deplorably smug time - but NAD separates are their own reward) since I've had to buy a hifi.