After much research, I decided on my turntable, a Michell Gyrodec SE.

It looks like this:

You might think that there is a Gyrodec (there is) and that this is the Special Edition, but no, it’s the “Spider Edition”. Lots of expensive and unnecessary bits, like the perspex cover, have been removed. This has, people say, improved the sound as well as reducing the price (so it is affordable for poor folk like me). If you want, it can be upgraded later.

It sounds great. Over the years, bits have been changed, like the wires in the tonearm, and I bought a record clamp which flattens slightly warped records and improves the contact between the platter and the disc.

As a mechanical device, it needs a service occasionally. I bought a new cartridge recently, and took the opportunity to check all the settings and tweak it a bit.

You may recognise the style of turntable from A Clockwork Orange:

I know a modest amount about hifi, especially the old stuff (nowadays it’s all sample rates and jitter and electronic engineering, of which I know nothing), but I’m not the sort of person who spends hours trying different combinations of tonearm and cartridge, or cabling or other fiddly things. I find something that works that I like, and I use it. Lack of funds puts limits on what I can use.

I have very many lps from the late 1960s onwards. I had a turntable, a Pink Triangle Little Pink Thing, and it sounded great but was so poorly built and was continually breaking down.

I gave up and it went into the trash, it was so poorly built.