Naturally, I'm not one to leave well enough alone... While I've felt a certain amount of smugness towards my friends who've been flaunting their vinyl collections- after all, I've managed to free myself of the yoke of materialism and shed myself of the onerous burden of stuff... The truth is, listening to digital media negates the tactile qualities of putting on a record and dropping the needle, relegating music to background noise, never mind the arguments over the qualities of digital streaming sounds vs analog. I wasn't actively listening to music, so much as using it to fill up space. With that in mind, I began looking at turntables. My last turntable was a Denon DP45 that I've had since the early 90's, when I worked at an independent record store in my home town, which I left to gather dust in my old man's barn in Iowa. I thought about getting another, and promptly looked at the used market and was shocked to see them listed in the ball park of $400-800. Yikes!
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![Image](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/fPIAAOSwzlpi~6bS/s-l1600.jpg)
The price wasn't exorbitant, it was a handsome deck and I was all ready to pull the trigger when something entirely different caught my eye, a Pro-Ject Debut Carbon that had a recently replaced Ortophon Red cartridge that was listed for $150. I polled my audiophile friends, red reviews and decided that a 4 year-old entry level audiophile deck with an almost new cartridge was a better deal than a nearly 50 year old table with an unknown stylus and any number of problems that could emerge. I made a detour on my way home from work to pick it up and after not buying any physical media in 16 years and despite my partner's admonitions against becoming a record collector, I've now got a Discogs account and have become the old guy digging the crates at my neighborhood record shop. Yay!
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/bHiRnD2.jpg)