Legend Killers - Turntables

[General_sound]

Most of us on the wrong side of 65 would have owned or handled portable record players. MY HMV Fiesta, with a plastic tone arm and mono cart along with a white grilled detachable speaker is still with me. Sadly it does not work. My friend in college had the Philips 633. Introduced in 1973, for around 600₹, this truly had wonderful rich sound. Presently own a red Ion iPT usb portable record player, which can run on six D batteries or 12v AC adapter. However to see the revival of portables like Handy traxx above is indeed heartening. Hope they sound good. Bhaskarda comment on HI Q international players is so correct: the best was the first iteration with a straight arm and three speed, with a GP224/204 ceramic cart. The later model had a S shaped tone arm with two speed and non replaceable stylus.

 

[reubensm]

Yes, Philips record players were superior in quality to HMV, the hi-q international player with built in amp was far superior to its HMV counterparts, the Popular II, 666, 1010, 1212 and 1515. Overall Philips models sounded better than HMV primarily because of (1) better quality cartridges and styli, (2) better circuit design and layout (mostly copies of Holland and Belgium Philips designs) with high quality components, especially the capacitors and semiconductors made by Philips themselves (there were the days when Philips manufactured their own components, before the NXP era), (3) although basic, the Philips tonearms on these models were superior to the HMV models with better tracking, and to top it all off, Philips used high quality speaker drivers in their portables and very high quality full range speakers in models like the HI-Q international.

For those interested in the history of portable record players in India, there is a nice article at The Revolver Club website called "Indian Audio Icons - Portable Record Players" which documents the history behind these models being introduced and refers to the various popular models available at the time.

The models from KORG seem to be nice but highly priced too, initial reports indicate that they cost around the $1000 mark.