Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My daughter received this turntable from Santa this Christmas along with several albums. It sounded ok through the built-in speakers, but not great. They definitely weren't doing The Beatles justice. I went down to the basement and dusted off an old Sony receiver/amplifier I had from the late 1990's. I then went up to the attic and brought down some old Bose bookshelf speakers from around the same period. Both amp and speakers were in great shape. They just needed a little cleaning. After hooking everything up, I powered on the turntable and amp and threw on Let It Be. The resulting sound can best be described as a dozen or so ferrel cats being simultaneously dragged down a chalkboard. It was horrendous. I checked and rechecked connections and settings. No good. I figured the amp may have been damaged by moisture from having been in the basement for so long, so I dusted off another old amp I had just to see. This one was a very high end Philips amp from the 1980's. Same results. The RCA connectors I used were high end, so I pretty much ruled those out. The speaker cable was brand new 18 gauge and the runs were only a couple of feet in either direction. I didn't think that was the issue. The sound quality was equally bad from both speakers. I even tried shifting the connections from "speaker system A" to "speaker system B" with no luck. The sound was unlistenable. On a hunch, I reconnected the RCA connectors from "phono" to "aux". This solved the problem. I then reconnected the turntable to the Sony amp, this time running the connection through the "tape/dat" RCA input as there was no "aux" on the Sony amp. Following some minor adjustments to the amp settings, the resulting sound was actually remarkable. It produces that nice warm mellow sound you simply cannot get from today's digital recordings. The best I can figure is that older amps must have some sort of special RCA connections that are designed for older phonographs. They probably have some sort of compensating filtering or adjustment that takes into account the fact that older turntables don't have pre-amps. Your guess is as good as mine. Either way, if you decide to hook this turntable up to an older amp with a "phono" RCA connection, you may experience similar results to mine. If so, simply move it to one of the other available RCA connectors. If you have an old amp and speakers lying around, I would highly recommend that you hook them up to this turntable. I suspect that you will be very pleased with the results.