In reply to:

I'd check out garage sales first, before I blew a couple hundred on a new table.



After spending all afternoon poking around eBay, I'm convinced that if you want to support 78rpm records, your choices are to buy something old (i.e., 1970's or earlier) or to buy one of the brand new DJ decks.

I went to Guitar Center today to poke my fingers into all the DJ gear and see how I like it. One interesting discovery is that, for all the DJ record players that support S/PDIF output (Stanton, Denon, Numark), there's no externally accessible gain control. That's a big deal, because different cartridges have radically different output levels. They probably set the gain to support some kind of "average" cartridge, but the more audiophile-minded cartridges tend to be quieter, which means you're not getting the full use of those 16-bit samples.

Also interesting is just how influential Technics has been. Every other vendor's turntables are clones of the Technics SL1200 series, with minor differences here and there. There appears to be a furious arms race going on with random features being added by everybody but Technics to try to justify why you should buy them instead of Technics. Various checkbox features seem to include 78rpm mode, backward-playing mode, "battle" mode (turning the player 90 degrees to make it easier to swap records quickly), and "key lock" (constant-pitch tempo stretching, done via on-board DSP). When you look at them all together, they're so amazingly similar that you have to wonder if all these different brands are made in the same factory somewhere in China.

The solution I'm currently toying with is buying the Denon DP-DJ151 (typical online vendor). Strangely, TopDJGear has this for $299, while the "cheaper" DJ101 costs $349. For that money, you get the aforementioned digital output of dubious quality, but you also get line-level audio out, which means I don't have to stick a pre-processor between the turntable and my computer . Then, all I have to buy is an appropriate cartridge. The only concern with the DJ151, since it has a DSP in there, is that when you're playing it "straight", it might still be routing everything through the DSP, which could be an issue with the aforementioned possible lower line levels.

And, then I discovered www.78rpm.com. Finally, everything you need to know all in one place. They sell a bunch of 6 or 7-speed record players (there are several variants on "78" rpms that were used), and they also have some funky pre-amps that can deal with non-standard equalization curves that have been used before the RIAA standardized things in the 1950's.

(And audiophiles wonder why the world prefers digital technology...)