A Millennial Walks Into A Record Store…

Thinking about beginners can approach the world of vinyl without trying to get everything "perfect" or spend a ton of money. Audiophiles and gatekeepers, avert your eyes.

I recently got my hands on my dad’s old record player, which he’s been storing in his basement for years. I’ve asked him about it before, but he’s always launched into a story about how hard it is to get the old turntable and speakers working, how it needs this and that component replaced, how it’s just too much of a pain to bother with. Even when my sister and I offered to fix it up for him for Christmas one year, he didn’t seem interested. So in my head, this turntable was some mystical beast that would require ten engineers and a magical elf to get working again, and I forgot about it.

But in parallel, like many Millennials, I’d formed an inexplicable interest in vinyl. I grew up in a time when music was becoming a digital commodity for the first time. Sure, I had some CD’s, but in the end I ripped them all into digital files and listened to them on my iPod. The music itself wasn’t the “thing” I attached symbolism to, it was the music’s container, the iPod and the headphones themselves, that I held onto as real. I never really had the tangible feeling of holding my media in my hands, at least not in a way you hear vinylheads talk about

Even now, when I try to appreciate my old CD collection, they mean very little to me. The songs and artists do, sure, but the discs themselves are just plastic vessels for digital files, not even that attractive to look at, and my brain always thinks of them as little more than backups for the “real” music library on my iPod, even a decade after my iPod stopped functioning properly.

For some reason, vinyl is a little bit more concrete. It’s a very intentional way to choose and listen to music, and that’s appealing. I don’t care as much as some about the ritual of holding the music, of staring at the art and reading the liner notes like they contain secrets of the universe, although I know this is part of the enjoyment for many.

So while I can’t pretend to have an explanation of why I think vinyl is cool, the fact is that it appeals to me. So this is my story about how I got into vinyl, and the things I’ve learned in the process, both practical and personal.

Bonus read: this issue of

Daniel Parris

’ Stat Significant goes into the growing magic of vinyl. It makes me feel a little bit better that he can’t fully explain it either!

Unpacking Vinyl's Remarkable Revival: A Statistical Analysis

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First, a few caveats about the following post. The way you listen to vinyl can trigger strong feelings, depending on your generation. It’s sacred territory for many music enthusiasts.

So you should know where I’m coming from to understand why I’m writing this. This is meant to be an accessible story about how I, a Millennial, got started in vinyl, and how I approach it as a beginner. My setup is not acoustically perfect, and it’s not meant to be. Rather, I’m sharing this to show how an imperfect turntable setup is still awesome, and to show how much fun it is to jump into something without trying to over-optimize first. Because if there’s anything the internet has trained us to do, it’s to over-optimize until all the joy is gone, and most importantly that means BUY GEAR and fuel the capitalism beast. But not here! Not while Jamwise is a thing! We will take joy in imperfection in the name of (somewhat) resisting consumerism, dammit.

So here’s where I’m coming from.

I am not the following:

• A person with large amounts of disposable income

• An extreme audiophile, e.g. someone who needs to hear every drop of saliva on a singer’s uvula vibrating to appreciate music

• An expert on vinyl, turntables, or their myriad components

Instead, this is what I am

• Someone whose first music purchases were MP3s and used CDs

• An enthusiastic vinyl beginner

• Someone who thinks records are cool, but doesn’t consider physical media the end-all be-all solution to the music industry’s problems

• Someone who can enjoy a “good enough” vinyl experience without focusing only on the shortcomings

• Someone who believes beginners should be encouraged to start however they’re able, rather than forcing them into someone else’s version of perfection

• A gear head learning to resist my base urges to buy only the best gear regardless of whether I can afford it or not

So with those things in mind, here’s the story of how I got into vinyl in 2024! Hopefully it’ll do a tiny part in breaking down the gates that have been kept around this hobby since before I was born.

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To make a long story short, I eventually got past my dad’s hangups and took over the family record player.

And, in a shocking twist, there wasn’t really that much work required to get this thing working. It took me a lot of investigation and research to come to the conclusion that getting this thing working was going to be pretty simple.

So here’s my free record player. When I took it to the shop, they told me it was pretty decent - it’s barely used, and it’s got a “direct drive,” which is apparently good. (Rookie translation - some record players use belts to turn the table, and a belt can stretch, which can make the record spin unevenly. Direct drives don’t have this issue as much). As the guy at the store said, “with a direct drive, if it turns, it works.” I’m sure it’s not always so simple, but in my case, it was, because my turntable indeed achieved successful rotation.

First, the easy part - I needed a new needle. The needle and the cartridge are two parts of the turntable that need semi-regular replacement anyway, so this is no big deal. I got a new needle for $35, popped it in, and we were good to go.

Second, the complicated part - I needed to get the sound from the record player to my speakers. What speakers did I want? What kind of amplifier did I want? These were questions I had no answers to. The following is what I learned - and I recommend you read through it, because if your record player shop is anything like mine, they’re gonna try to sell you every dongle and box under the sun, and you’re going to want to know what you need and what you don’t.

The Complicated Stuff

So here’s the part about record players that confuses people of my generation, non-audiophiles, and the non-technical among us. I’ll try to provide easy definitions, based on what I’ve learned, for everything here. These aren’t meant to be perfect defintions - they’re meant to be just good enough for a beginner to get an intuitive understanding.

And again, remember that this is intended to show the simplest possible turntable setup, not the best from an audio perspective.

This is the process that lets the record player make sound from your record, in simple terms.

1. The record spins on the turntable and the needle touches the record, picking up vibrations from the grooves in the record

2. The magical genie in the turntable turns the vibration into a teeny-tiny electrical signal

3. A pre-amplifier makes this weak signal into a stronger signal (the stronger signal is the same as your aux cable’s level, for the Millennials out there)

4. An amplifer turns this stronger signal into a super-strong signal

5. This super-strong signal vibrates a speaker and out comes the music

This process seems like a lot of steps, but what we’re going to do is simplify it as much as possible to answer one question: “What’s the minimum equipment I need to listen to a record?” I’m going to go through some examples for how you can set up your record player - what you need and don’t need to get the music going. Take these examples for what they are - different ways to understand the system.

Different Ways to Setup a Record Player

There are traditionally 4 components you need to make records play - the record player/turntable, the pre-amplifier, the amplifier, and the speaker. Each one of these is included in the process above - and I’m combining the needle as part of the turntable itself.

These setups are for understanding purposes - but you can also use them to figure out what else you need based on the gear you have. Say you find a turntable and an amplifier at Goodwill, you’ll need to know what else you need to get them working - use these options as a rough guide.

We’ll call this turntable setup #1:

Turntable Setup option #1: Turntable → Pre-amp → Amplifier → Passive Speaker

But here’s a secret - this is overcomplicated if you grew up in the age of Bluetooth speakers. There are many secrets I uncovered when trying to put together these 4 components in the simplest possible way - and people used to the technology of a different time will confuse the hell out of you with their talk of “receiver boxes” and “speaker wire” and all the other stuff you used to need to make sounds louder.

The first secret I learned is that nearly every speaker the majority of the MP3 generation grew up with (bluetooth speakers, soundbars, computer speakers, headphones, boomboxes, etc.) has an amplifier already, or doesn’t need one (e.g. ipod headphones which use an aux level signal). (Hint: if you’ve never heard the term “passive speaker”, you’re probably already overqualified for this section. More on that later). My generation grew up with primarily active speakers, and passive speakers aren’t really necessary for most - I’d make the case that if you have a powered speaker of some sort already, your money is better spent elsewhere when setting up a beginner system.

A passive speaker requires a separate amplifier. So if you have a Bluetooth speaker or something similar at home, you already have an amplifier. In general, for my generation, if you have a speaker and you don’t know if it’s passive or not, it’s almost certainly an active speaker.

The second secret is that the massive BOX that you see on Instagram posts about fancy turntable setups is total overkill. This is normally either an amplifier or a combination of a pre-amp and an amplifier. And we’ve already established that the majority of young beginners have amplifiers already in our speakers, so we don’t really need another one. But keep in mind that these boxes are useful options for setup #1, and they might combine pre-amp with amplifier, and they might not.

But moving forward - the speaker + amplifier combo is the first way to simplify your setup. Now we’re down to 3 components: turntable, pre-amp, and amplifier/speaker combo (also known as an active speaker)

Turntable setup option #2: Turntable → Pre-amp → Active Speaker

This is a pretty simple way to set up your turntable, and it’s the way I run mine (more on that later). But we can simplify even further, if we want.

In short, there are many turntables that have a pre-amp built in. This means you can plug your headphones or active speaker straight into the turntable and hear normal-volume sound. So without getting into the details or the pros/cons, we have our final setup option, the most simple from a number of parts perspective:

Turntable setup option #3: Turntable with Pre-amp, Active Speaker

And finally, there is one more option to simplify even further - the turntable with built-in speaker. Suffice it to say that these turntables have all the components you need inside the box, and you don’t need to worry about them - turntable, pre-amp, amplifier, and speaker all do their thing inside one package.

These turntables can normally be plugged into external speakers as well if you want, but we’ll skip that option for the sake of simplicity.

Turntable setup option #4: Turntable with built in speaker

Pros and Cons of Different Setups

For each of our 4 options, it’s useful to know the pros and cons. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using a combination turntable/speaker if that’s your best option, no matter what the internet snobs might say - but you should be aware that you won’t get the best sound quality with that setup.

Option 1: Turntable → pre-amp → amplifier → passive speaker

• Pros:

  • Potential for 10/10 sound quality, if you spend $$$

  • Can upgrade individual pieces separately

  • Passive speakers can be cheaper than active for similar quality level - but that’s not counting the amplifier cost

• Cons:

  • Cheapest component options are less reliable

  • Most expensive

  • Most wires and space required

  • You’ll probably have to learn what speaker wire is 🤮

Option 2: Turntable → pre-amp → active speaker

• Pros:

  • Many people already have active speakers that can work for this setup

  • You can use Bluetooth if you get an extra component (see my setup below)

  • Sound quality max is like an 8/10, or 6/10 with bluetooth (still good enough for most people in my opinion)

• Cons:

  • Lower max sound quality, but still good enough for almost everyone

  • Cheap standalone pre-amps can be junk, nice ones can be expensive

Option 3: Turntable + pre-amp → active speaker

• Pros:

  • Can be cost-effective for decent sound quality

  • Many people already have active speakers that can work for this setup

  • You can use Bluetooth if you get an extra component (see my setup below)

  • Sound quality max is like a 7/10, or 5/10 with bluetooth (still good in my opinion)

• Cons:

  • Built-in pre-amps are often lower-end, but good enough for beginners

Option 4: Turntable with speaker

• Pros:

  • All-in-one package, quick startup

  • Lowest cost option

  • Takes up very little space

• Cons:

  • Peak sound quality is probably a 3/10 (slightly lower than iPod headphone quality in my unscientific experience)

  • Can damage records faster due to speaker vibrations

  • Targeted at beginners, can be unreliable or low build quality

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My Turntable Setup

As it turned out, I had a pretty easy turntable to set up. It spun just fine, and the new needle worked like a charm. And my speaker situation, while not perfect, might be relatable to some people.

I have a setup most similar to #3 above, with a turntable, pre-amp, and an active speaker. I also added a little dongle that broadcasts the record player signal via bluetooth, so I could use my old trusty Bose bluetooth speaker from 2014.

To summarize, here are the components I bought:

• Turntable (already had)

• New needle ($35)

• Phono pre-amp ($75)

• Bluetooth transmitter ($35)

• 3.5mm cables ($5)

• RCA cables ($3)

• Speaker (already had)

That’s a total of around $150. Not cheap, but not $1000+ like I’d always thought.

I spent a little more money than I had to on the pre-amp because the internet says it makes a difference in the sound. I didn’t spend TOO much because I knew I’d be using Bluetooth anyway, and there’s no point getting studio-quality sound and sending it through Bluetooth, which compresses the sound anyway.

If I were to re-create this setup with a Goodwill turntable (~$30), it would work fine as long as the turntable functioned - most turntables you’d find at a thrift store would not have a built in pre-amp. If I’d bought a newer turntable with built-in pre-amp (around $225), I could have saved the $75 and put that towards the turntable itself.

With a thrift shop turntable, this setup would cost around $200 (plus any cost to fix the turntable up). With a brand-new turntable, a similar setup would cost around $400. And if you don’t have a speaker, just add the cost of a mid-range speaker (bluetooth or not, up to you).

Vinyl isn’t cheap, but $200-400 is a lot better than I’d always imagined.

The setup is very flexible - I can listen to records through bluetooth speakers, bluetooth headphones, wired speakers, or wired headphones. I can use most of the same equipment if I ever buy nicer speakers.

And it sounds pretty good. True audio wizards might not agree, but whatever. This setup is more than clear enough to hear the difference between a poor-quality record and a high-quality one, and to hear the difference between Spotify and vinyl. Good vinyl sounds much better in this setup than high-res Spotify tracks - this is likely as much to do with the vinyl-specific mixing as it is the sound quality, but it’s true. I think more nuanced differences would be apparent if I had a nice set of stereo speakers, but the fact I can already hear the difference tells me I’ve found a decent value.

The weaknesses to my setup are the lack of true stereo sound since I’m only using one speaker, the reliance on bluetooth (which is optional anyway, since I could always plug in speakers directly using an Aux cable instead of using my bluetooth dongle), and the speaker itself. But I’d argue that this setup is more than good enough for most people looking to spin a few old records. It’s several steps above an all-in-one turntable setup, and it doesn’t cost that much more.

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So now I’m curious - what do you think of this breakdown? I’d love to hear from experts, but I’d especially love to hear from fellow beginners who might have considered a turntable too complicated to get into. My philosophy is that it’s only overcomplicated if you over-optimize - if you don’t value the benefits of getting the best of the best system, there’s no shame in getting something less complex.