Fluance RT84 Reference High Fidelity Vinyl Turntable Record Player with Ortofon 2M Blue Cartridge, Speed Control Motor, High Mass MDF Wood Plinth, Vibration Isolation Feet - Piano Black

Beautiful finish, beautiful design, and a great setup with the Ortofon Blue 2 cartridge. Very quiet but produces a lovely sound. My reference table, SOTA Sapphire with Grado Timbre Platinum cost 10 times as much, but does not sound 10 times better, the differences are rather slight and subtle. I would call the Fluance 84/85 the best bargain ever in a geat quality TT, your ears will love it.

The Fluance RT84 turntable is a great turntable. Excellent design (Canada) and quality construction (Taiwan) for a reasonable price. Setup is simple and no tools are required. The owner's manual is well written with plenty of pictures making assembly easy. The hardest part of a turntable setup is mounting the cartridge in the head shell; this is already done for you at the factory. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to put this turntable together.The performance of this turntable is well above average for turntable at this price. The platter is dead silent and smooth when spinning, and the tone arm and needle drop perform very well. The supplied Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge is a perfect match and sounds great. The RT84 is easy to upgrade the to their top of the line model (RT85) by simply swapping the platter. The RT85 heavy acrylic platter is available from Fluance for about $120.Two things to remember about this turntable... First, there is NO built in phono preamp. You have to either have an external phono preamp, or your other equipment needs to have this built in. Second, even though this turntable has an auto shutoff feature, you still need to consider it as a manual turntable. When the tonearm reaches the end of the record, the platter will continue to spin for about 30 seconds and then stop. I consider this a ''safety net'' for times when I can't get right over to the turntable at the end of the record to lift the tone arm.Bottom line... I recommend this turntable as a good buy and great performer, and I would buy it again. I used to be a manger at a stereo store (not big box) so I have seen and assembled a whole lot of different turntables.