Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Full disclosure: I'm a vinyl record enthusiast, I've been using turntables for over 30 years, and I repair/rebuild/restore vintage turntables. If you've been reading reviews for this turntable, you may have already seen the very thorough review written by Carl F. Green, who described receiving two turntables with warped platters, as well as two replacement platters from the manufacturer that were also warped. Despite Mr. Green's very unfortunate and frustrating experience, I decided to go ahead and order this turntable, hoping that what happened to Mr. Green was just an isolated incident. Sadly, I too received a turntable with a severely warped platter. There were also some other issues, such as the cartridge being incorrectly aligned, and unstable speeds (perhaps a consequence of the platter being so badly unbalanced). The last time I saw a platter this badly warped was on a cheap all-plastic bookshelf stereo from the local big-box store. I never would have expected a similar defect from Audio-Technica, especially in a product that actually uses the word "professional" in its name. Normally I'd simply exchange it for another one, but after reading Mr. Green's report of receiving multiple warped replacement platters directly from Audio-Technica, I'm not going to waste my time. It's clear that A-T is not doing a good enough job of inspecting these turntables (or their replacement parts!) before they leave the factory. It's very disappointing because this is a nice looking machine, it's very heavy, and it has many of the great features found in the legendary Technics SL-1200... but the similarity is only skin deep. Technics' direct drive system is an engineering marvel; the direct drive system employed by Audio-Technica is crude and primitive by comparison. As far as the platter is concerned, there's no way I'm going to play my cherished records on a platter that bounces up and down like this (which would also cause the stylus to wear out prematurely)... and my time is too valuable to deal with weeks or months of sending back defective platters, waiting for replacements to arrive, and then repeating the process again and again (and I'd have to pay out-of-pocket to send the defective platters back to A-T; that would get very expensive very quickly). The only bright spot in all of this is that Amazon made it easy to send this thing back for a full refund. If your budget is less than 300 bucks, there are other turntables that offer better quality, better reliability, and better performance. Consider the excellent (and made in America!) U-Turn Orbit from U-Turn Audio.