Unless you have been living in a hermetically sealed cultural vacuum for the past 10 years, you've probably realised that vinyl record sales are on the up, despite 95 percent of all commercially released music in the world being on streaming services. I welcome this because the ephemeral nature of streaming, the fact that streaming services can memory hole songs at a whim, and you will own nothing and be happy is something that must be stopped at all costs.
However.
I don't welcome the sort of turntables that your average zoomer and Gen Alpha is being sold. It's these. Crosley Cruisers. They're everywhere! HMV sells them. I can see why they're popular because they are very, well, Instacrap friendly, and they come in all manner of different colours and things. Unfortunately, they are bad. Really bad. So bad, in fact, that for every youngster who gets into listening to music stamped on hot wax, there will be others that think (rightly) that this sounds like arse, and not bother.
So, what is it? Well, it's a portable record player designed cunningly to look like a briefcase or a small suitcase. It has a pretend leather exterior and clips shut like a briefcase, and opens to reveal a plastic turntable, tonearm, and suchlike. There are two speakers in the front each side of the handle and a battery compartment, AC adapter for power, and some line outputs and a USB socket on the rear. It uses a ceramic cartridge so you don't need a pre-amp or anything like that; you can simply flip it open, plop a record on it, and play. However I recommend against this for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the Crosley Cruiser is a mug's eyeful. It is currently sold in the UK for about £67.99 through to £109.99 (if you get the Urban Outfitters exclusive model) in loads of stores both on and off line. However, if you go onto AliExpress you can purchase the exact same turntable for £25 or less, just without the branding. In fact, the same turntable I've also seen branded Bush and Victrola and on Amazon you can get obvious Chinesium ones with brands like VIFLYKOO and similar random letters. They're all the same Chinesium crap though. A number of importers, you see, realised that loads of mid-century radio and stereo brands were vacant or sold to people who didn't use them, so they purchased them for a small sum of money then started dropshipping Chinesium suitcase turntables into markets throughout the West. They slapped these brands on them and confused grannies who will have remembered having a Crosley or a Victrola in their youth will no doubt grab one for their grandchildren. They will then pay three times the cost that they could get it for off AliExpress and provide their grateful (?) grandchildren with... with what exactly?
What indeed. The Crosley Cruiser and similar turntables. How bad can they be? Well, really bad. Granted, they won't chew up records like certain audiophiles claim. Their 6.5g tracking force is a bit high, yes, but it is in the recommended range for the cartridge they have. But that's the only good thing you can say about them. The cartridge is a cost downed knockoff of a ceramic cartridge mounted on a head that is designed to look like the head from a real phono cartridge but is just a bit of plastic with screw shapes moulded into it. The tonearm itself is plastic and has no counterweight but has a spring to adjust tracking force and provide rudimentary anti-skating. It does have a hollow bit of plastic on the back to look like a counterweight though. The actual mechanism has no auto-return and auto-stop that works about half the time, and is belt driven. Now there's nothing wrong with a belt driven turntable, but the motor they use is a knockoff itself. So you have a noisy, surface noise riddled mess with heaps of wow and flutter, being fed through cheap, nasty speakers in the base of the device. Your records will sound like arse on this. Trust me. I know. If you connect proper speakers via the line input in the back it will sound better. Similarly, if you put a genuine ceramic cartridge on the tonearm and reduce the tracking force slightly by taping a coin to the back of the tonearm, it will also sound marginally better, but that's as far as it gets.
The mechanism itself is a low cost mechanism that was used on Amstrad style all in one tower stereos in the 1980s, only cost downed even further. Strobe marks? Gone. Trim ring? Gone. Actual weight to the platter? Gone. It's a plastic fantastic piece of shite.
Here's the thing though. It doesn't have to be like this. For just a bit more money you can get an Audio Technica turntable with built in pre-amp and proper magnetic cartridge. Better still, if you want to get a record turntable to rediscover or discover vinyl records, go onto Greedbay and get a midrange turntable from back in the day. You can find some right bargains. If you really must get a brand new turntable though, without breaking the bank excessively (though at a significantly higher price than a Crosley) I recommend the Rega Planar 1+. This is possibly the best bang for buck record player on the market, contains a built in pre-amp so you can just jam it straight into your powered speakers or similar, and most importantly of all, is made in England. That's right. In fact it's made in Southend-on-Sea no less. It also looks really, really, sharp with that big woodgrain base.
But back to the Crosley Cruiser. Yes, it might look nice on Instacrap but it's still a mug's eyeful in the very intended sense of the term.
(IN24/21)