People of Vinyl, lend me your advice!

[Brad]

Point is that the record player has a Line Out socket. At this stage the sound should already be shaped properly and at line level. If it isn't the you're fighting a losing battle I reckon.

[randombs]

Oh I know it's a losing battle

But it's not actual line out like you'd expect. It's just phono out, that's it. It sounds exactly the same in terms of volume and tone as the headphone socket but doesn't mute the speakers like the headphone socket. I wouldn't be surprised if I opened it and found the output just going to phono, sub woofer and headphone sockets in parallel. I'm surprised none of the customer reviews I found about it mentioned the need for a preamp. Maybe they were running it to amps that did that already...

You didn't need that pre-amp.

However, if you plug the lineout of the record deck into the aux-in of the Phil Collins the sound quality should approach that of the built in CD player on the Phil. If it sounds significantly worse then it's because there's something very wrong in the record player.

I already did that and it doesn't. It really doesn't

I'm gonna sound like an elitist dick here but I'll say it anyway. Every time you play a bit of vinyl you are gradually destroying it. Even the world's most expensive turntable will have this effect. That... THING.. in your photo looks like it's going to get the job done really quickly!

Absolutely not. That's advice, that is. I expect it probably will do some damage but so far I'm only playing ?1 vinyls on it so not too worried right now. Most likely planning on selling everything and getting a proper hifi.

Apologies for not understanding what you were trying to do earlier on and encouraging you to buy that phono stage :-(

From what I've found so far, I needed it anyway, so don't worry

[speedlolita]

My ex had one of those combo units at one stage. Frankly it was just awful. She couldn't believe how much better a proper unit sounded through my old speaker setup.

That whole setup TT included came to around ?200 I believe.