Cheapo Hi-FI: mission accomplished?

A few months ago I set myself a challenge of building a separates Hi-Fi on a budget. I think I spent about £150 in total and ended up with an OK little set up. However, whilst some components were bought for very little money, the turntable swallowed up three quarters of the budget. In the midst of the current vinyl resurgence, a bargain turntable is a very hard thing to come by. However, a few weeks ago I happened across one such bargain.

 
A new charity shop (or 'thirft store' as our American cousins say) opened not far away and I went for a look. Hiding amongst the toasters and old Sky TV boxes was a very dusty mini turntable. It had no stylus and looked a bit unloved. There were still signs of life as when I plugged it in and moved the tone arm, the platter span. The price? £5. I put it back on the shelf just as my wife walked past and said, "That's worth the gamble for £5". So the turntable came with me.

On closer inspection is turns out I had bought a Sony PS-J20 mini turntable. Miraculously the lid was scratch and crack free and the unit cleaned up quite nicely. As I expected, the platter was spinning WAY off correct speeds. But with an RPM calculator app on my phone and a few tweaks on the (rather temperamental) potentiometers, it was soon running at 33.3 and 45 rpm quite nicely.

The instructions I downloaded suggested this little beast was circa 2000 and was missing a few accessories such as a mat for the platter and an EP adapter. Once I located the correct stylus and ordered the accessories, the turntable was beginning to look pretty good. All of the automation of the tone arm and buttons worked as expected. All good so far.

Before I committed any of my precious vinyl to this turntable I looked at the tracking force to check the stylus wasn't going to try to gouge its way through the record. Happily the scales said 2.5g. Rather respectable I thought.

How does it sound? Well it's OK. It's not the greatest, but it does a job. There's a lot of distortion on "S"sounds on some records and the tone is quite thin (compared to the admittedly bass heavy SL-1200). But the automation is handy when you just want to leave a record spinning in the background and its compact size means it fits anywhere.

Yes, I spent more in restoring it than the purchase cost, but it was worth it. With a bit of effort and good luck you can have a reasonable standard turntable for £20. Despite its shortcomings this has to be better than any ION or Crossley type disaster on sale today.