Worst turntable contest

I wish to god that I had something better to add to this hilarious thread - the 'Cobra' did it for me.
I'm just lucky, I guess - the 'worst' I can come up with is a very brief relationship with a Gerrard 0-100, as the knobs/levers all promptly broke off. Think I then hit it with a hammer as I recall. And then to the dump,dump, dump.
 
You must have been a sadist to do that much damage to the Garrard. Not the most robust table but enough to take the usual punishment. By any chance did you work for Consumers Union at the time and were assigned the torture test?
 
I think all the reflections from the chrome plated plastic parts may so blind customers that they can't see the arm (or more properly, its absence). Pretty remarkably cheesy looking.
 
You must have been a sadist to do that much damage to the Garrard. Not the most robust table but enough to take the usual punishment. By any chance did you work for Consumers Union at the time and were assigned the torture test?

My secret is out. Actually the first hammer blow rather improved the sound - my guess was insufficient tracking force. After that, with repeated blows, there was a noticeable decline in the quality of the playback until, regrettably, it failed to pass even the most basic playback tests. Oddly, the same test seems to produce similar results on other turntables. Must revisit test parameters.
 
Around 1988 I bought this thing, below (either it was that particular model or
one that was very, very similar). An Amstrad midi-hifi for £100 - a lot of money
to a 15 year old with a paper round.

The whole thing was plastic, the "turntable" included. Plastic platter, and bendy
plastic "tonearm". :no: It had a cheap & nasty ceramic cartridge that was real
bottom-of-the-food-chain stuff - the left channel sounded poor but the right
channel was bad beyond description - just a sort of hollow noise lacking any
detail with no bass to speak of whatsoever. Must've tracked at about 4-5g too.

I owned it for less than 6 months before I got shot of it and bought my first
set of separates - a Goodmans midi-width turntable (the GSP-308 which had
an Audio Technica AT3601 MM cartridge) a Sanyo 20WPC amplifier and a pair
of Fisher speakers. Hardly the last word in quality but a million times better
than the Amstrad, and those three components were bought brand new from
Richer Sounds HiFi for a total of about £120! I stiil have that AT3601 cartridge.

amstrad_hifi_ms45_88368496.jpg


Alan Sugar, you bastard purveyor of pish poor "hi-fi" :no: You should be fired...


James H
 
12 pages and the sole mention of Fisher Price doesn't nominate it? It wins. True, the build quality does actually surpass many of the tables posted, but the performance and vinyl damage outweigh that by a long shot.

2772399270_3fb1ec9355.jpg
 
Yorx POS integrated system thingy from the early 90s.

Came with a crap tuner, two high speed dubbing capable decks with NO Dolby NR and a totally craptastic turntable. The "bass reflex" speakers (no port, just a louvered vent at the back) and 2.5W amp rounded out this celebration of all that is unholy in audio. It was a small step up from a clock radio.

There was no aux in either so forget CD...not that this thing was worthy of having a CD player connected to it!

Runner up....most anything Sounddesign. Remember the fake tweeters and midranges and the useless "power meters" which looked like LEDs but were just a single bulb that got brighter as the power was increased?
 
Around 1988 I bought this thing, below (either it was that particular model or
one that was very, very similar). An Amstrad midi-hifi for £100 - a lot of money
to a 15 year old with a paper round.

The whole thing was plastic, the "turntable" included. Plastic platter, and bendy
plastic "tonearm". :no: It had a cheap & nasty ceramic cartridge that was real
bottom-of-the-food-chain stuff - the left channel sounded poor but the right
channel was bad beyond description - just a sort of hollow noise lacking any
detail with no bass to speak of whatsoever. Must've tracked at about 4-5g too.

I owned it for less than 6 months before I got shot of it and bought my first
set of separates - a Goodmans midi-width turntable (the GSP-308 which had
an Audio Technica AT3601 MM cartridge) a Sanyo 20WPC amplifier and a pair
of Fisher speakers. Hardly the last word in quality but a million times better
than the Amstrad, and those three components were bought brand new from
Richer Sounds HiFi for a total of about £120! I stiil have that AT3601 cartridge.
.
James H

There were absolutely dozens of those midi system things in every high street electrical barn between about 1985 and 1990. Binatone, Amstrad, Matsui, Hinari, Logik, Akura, Saisho - all using the same crappy type of plastic deck ceramic cart with plastic cantilever, and generic cassette mech with DC bias and no spool brakes.
I was given a Fidelity one at about that time for my birthday. Plastic crap, lasted about 4 years.
However, I was grateful for one thing - it taught me to appreciate the older gear. Until then I'd been using a Sanyo G2601 music centre, the deck on that was rumbly but at least the whole thing was solid and basically worked.
 
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A BSR Quanta 400 that some very odd person had installed in a PL-41 base. The opening in the base had been enlarged to accept this hideous piece of plastic so it was useless. I paid $3.00 for it, removed the lightly scuffed dustcover and hinges. Then I binned the rest of it.

I have nightmares about "that old Pioneer" being yanked out of the base and tossed to make room for the newer BSR. Good grief!

John
 
There were absolutely dozens of those midi system things in every high street electrical barn between about 1985 and 1990. Binatone, Amstrad, Matsui, Hinari, Logik, Akura, Saisho - all using the same crappy type of plastic deck ceramic cart with plastic cantilever, and generic cassette mech with DC bias and no spool brakes.
I was given a Fidelity one at about that time for my birthday. Plastic crap, lasted about 4 years.
However, I was grateful for one thing - it taught me to appreciate the older gear. Until then I'd been using a Sanyo G2601 music centre, the deck on that was rumbly but at least the whole thing was solid and basically worked.
I'm tempted to say I smell a rat and that it was a deliberate ploy to persuade
the general public that vinyl was a terrible format and you absolutely must bin
all your albums and buy them all again on these shiny new CD things, which
give you perfect sound forever, as some big electronics company used to tell
us in their adverts....

:scratch2:

Probably just my rampant paranoia kicking in though...


James H
 
Well lets see i believe the worst of the worst would have to be the turntable that was apart of the bookshelf system i bought at the drug store for $80 in the early 90's cus i couldn't affort better... that being the Yorx, i remember the tone arm being all plastic complete with plastic cantilever needle :) at the end of the record the cheap plastic platter simply turned off and would not even auto return... ahhh the memories... i must say i have never seen such i peace of junk before.

You must have bought the new and improved design because mine was a Yorx from the early part of the 80's and doesn't get much worse than that :D

I can say I really enjoyed it and actually had pride of ownership in it because it was something i went out and bought with my own money, now with hindsight 25 + years later I enter a thread about junky TT's and here i post ;)
 
I had a Garrard that came with an Electrophonic receiver (that should have been a clue) given to me by my sister when I was in middle school. Apart from having a horrible flipper stylus, it had this problem that it would occasionally shake and vibrate when a record fell from the changer spindle onto the platter causing the tone arm to skate and the other records on the spindle to fall on top of it.

The second worst turntable would have been the circa 1989 BPC version of the Pioneer PL-600, not to be confused with the 70's unit of the same name that was actually good. The BPC PL-600 was plastic, plastic and more plastic with the exception of the aluminum platter that was warped. I bought it new for about $99 when I was a freshman in high school about the time I bought a Pioneer SX-1300 receiver. Neither piece was anything special, but light years ahead of the old Electrophonic crap.

Ironically the same sister that gave me the Electrophonic equipment in the mid 80's, bought me a Technics SU-V9 Integrated Amp at an auction 15 years later for $25.
 
Not "worst" but gave me major headaches:

thorens%20td%20125%20mkII.jpg


Thorens TD125 MKII. Before people hate me, this is an extremely high quality turntable capable of world class sound. But... it was...

A pain in the *** to service. Leveling suspension springs take ages to complete. Any inclination on the platform changes the angle of the belt pulley and makes the pulley scrape the belt guides. Getting this alignment correct can take YEARS.

The circuitry's adjustment is arcane and requires lots of patience.

The bearing is pressed onto the main platform, not bolted. So there is no way to easily service the bearing.

The bearing spindle is pressed onto the platter, which means that everytime you remove the platter, you leave the (beautiful) spindle unprotected. To correct the belt problems, you will need to remove the platter about 20 times, which increases the possibility of bearing spindle damage.

A MAJOR PAIN IN THE BUTT TO SERVICE!! What the hell were those guys thinking?

I swear i will never own another suspended-belt turntable
again. I have another belt drive turntable right now, the Sansui SR-4050C (non suspended), and it's the total opposite. A dream to service. It even has a centralized lubrication well, just add some drops of oil into a special hole and everything is lubricated!!

Some months later, and i have to eat my words :banana:
... just bought again a TD125MK2, still haven't installed. But a lowly TD166MK2 made such a pleasant sound that i knew i had to get another 125. This one is in much better shape so i don't need to go through the nightmare of servicing it.
 
12 pages and the sole mention of Fisher Price doesn't nominate it? It wins. True, the build quality does actually surpass many of the tables posted, but the performance and vinyl damage outweigh that by a long shot.

2772399270_3fb1ec9355.jpg

I got you beat... I got one of these..

sa3609059817-er.jpg
 
I knew there would be a reason I should have bought it. In the great Fisher Studio Standard BPC era, they came out with a wizzbang unit. I wish I had a picture of it. It was a turntable type 3 disk player, with a very, I mean very flimsy "platter". Then what did the wonderscientists decide to do? They made the "platter" except a 12 inch album, right on top of the disk trays. The weight of the discs would most likely make it scrape as it turned. And the arm was awesome, kind of a plastic sticklike thing. I wish I had a picture. It is absolutely the worst table ever, bar none.

I think I (briefly) had one of those. Linear tracker...slave power supply. Tonearm looks like it came in a cereal box. Garbage.
 
Worst Turntable - Now a Collectors Item

I bought a Pioneer PL-530 full auto, direct drive, back in 1979. It was fitted with a Shure V15 IV.

Nice looking table, well built and finished. Total turd in operation.

I was running a Sansui AU-717 integrated amp through a pair of JBL L-166 Horizons. All of it was somewhat isolated on a decent rack.

Just for fun, I cued up a disc with the grill covers off of the speakers, and my God did the woofers do a "rumble dance". Those 12 inchers were moving 3/4" back and forth between cuts.

I immediately sold it and bought a Philips AF-877 belt drive. Ugly industrial looking device, but a well isolated sub-chassis and a better arm. No more "rumble dance".

Was it a bad unit? Does direct drive suck in cheaper tables? Never bought a direct drive since.
 
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