fredjones
Active Member
I recently bought a Teac TN-550 and would like to share my assessment.
I’ll keep it to the point:
PROS:
1. Sound I found to be very good, detailed, full, clear, what I expected and and little more from a turntable at this price.
2. Marble plinth – beautiful.
3. Feet seemed stout and able to absorb any vibration.
4. Aluminum tonearm and headshell, headshell attached firmly and easily.
5. Dust cover was the real deal, solid, good hinges that opened at set angle and stayed there.
6. Belt drive was rock stable speed, I played some speed sensitive LPs and they sounded fine.
7. Acrylic platter was perfectly machined and polished.
CONS:
1. Damper dropped the needle like a rock.
2. The instructions said to level the tonearm, but even though it is height adjustable, at its lowest the tonearm still was angled downward slightly. This could only be fixed by me adding a mat that was around 5mm thick.
3. The counter weight was not able to maintain a fixed position. It rotated appropriately, but could be shifted slightly forward or backward by just pushing slightly on it. This affected the tracking force by about a tenth of a gram just by doing this.
4. When I used it with my tube phono pre, it had a hum. None of my other tables do this, even the cheapest. It did fine with other preamps though.
The bad outweighed the good and it has since been sent back. My feeling is that Teac is not quite ready for prime time with these models yet. This may be a quality control issue and/or I just got a defective unit. Either way it might be best to avoid these for now.
I’ll keep it to the point:
PROS:
1. Sound I found to be very good, detailed, full, clear, what I expected and and little more from a turntable at this price.
2. Marble plinth – beautiful.
3. Feet seemed stout and able to absorb any vibration.
4. Aluminum tonearm and headshell, headshell attached firmly and easily.
5. Dust cover was the real deal, solid, good hinges that opened at set angle and stayed there.
6. Belt drive was rock stable speed, I played some speed sensitive LPs and they sounded fine.
7. Acrylic platter was perfectly machined and polished.
CONS:
1. Damper dropped the needle like a rock.
2. The instructions said to level the tonearm, but even though it is height adjustable, at its lowest the tonearm still was angled downward slightly. This could only be fixed by me adding a mat that was around 5mm thick.
3. The counter weight was not able to maintain a fixed position. It rotated appropriately, but could be shifted slightly forward or backward by just pushing slightly on it. This affected the tracking force by about a tenth of a gram just by doing this.
4. When I used it with my tube phono pre, it had a hum. None of my other tables do this, even the cheapest. It did fine with other preamps though.
The bad outweighed the good and it has since been sent back. My feeling is that Teac is not quite ready for prime time with these models yet. This may be a quality control issue and/or I just got a defective unit. Either way it might be best to avoid these for now.