Topaz tapedeck
I was sad to see it go as it was a fine amp and would handle MM or MC turntables something you rarely see these days. It was a KA-550, bought around 1985 with matching separate tuner, cassette deck and CD player. I still have a Trio/Kenwood amp at home, a KA-660 - which is a really nice amp.
I paid the grand total of £40 and it completely blows away any modern budget/mid range system in terms of sound qualify, and for less money.ĭoesn't really matter now, but there can't have been very much at all wrong with it, most probably it just needed the switches cleaning. I bought a Technics early/mid 80s separates system from the era when Technics still made superb audio equipment. Hence records played a lot on a really bad turntable are pretty much unlistenable when subsequently played on a really good one. The better a turntable is, the more it will expose any damage. The worse it is, the more damage it will cause.
Steepletone is crap, but I don't know if the model you have is really crap - I think some of theirs have a half-decent stylus and cartridge, so you may be OK. Really crap turntables do damage records, so that they sound really noisy when played back on decent equipment. Most decent equipment from 20-30 years ago is still going strong. You must not have two phono pre-amps in a row - that won't work at all.Īpart from the stylus and cartridge (which should be new), I would buy all this stuff second hand. You can't use a turntable without a phono pre-amp somewhere (in a modern turntable, in an older amplifier, or separate) because the electrical signal from the itself cartridge is far too low and has a specific (treble heavy and bass light) frequency response than needs correcting. Most people don't have a turntable any more, so most modern integrated amplifiers/receivers/surround systems don't include a phono pre-amp (a few older ones didn't either), hence you can buy a separate phono pre-amp to put between the turntable and any regular line-level input (labelled aux, CD, tuner, line-in, etc - they're all the same electrically) on your new-ish amplifier/receiver/surround sound thingy. Connect turntable to phono input, speakers to speaker outputs.
Topaz tapedeck plus#
A conventional turntable does not include a pre-amp - the signal from the cartridge just goes down the wires unchanged to a couple of RCA/phono plugs.Ī conventional (older) integrated amplifier usually includes the phono pre-amp, plus a standard pre-amp (typically include the volume and tone controls), and a power amplifier.