AUDIO-TECHNICA AT-LP3

£249 / audio-technica.com

Vinyl can be a scary business at times. No, not Friday The 13th scary. More like ‘constant sense of dread and anxiety’ scary. Even if you think you’ve got your turntable set up properly, how can you really be sure? The last thing you want to do is scratch that £40 Smiths remaster or, worse still, play it at a quality not befitting your turntable.

Enter Audio-technica’s brilliant AT-LP3: an automated spinner that’ll do all the hard stuff for you and make a great job of it. Imagine one of those awful one-box turntables you can get from Aldi, only without the ghastly in-built speaker, and actually good… so much so that nothing about this player’s look and feel betrays the fact that it’s a budget deck. It’s even got a built-in phono stage so you can feed the thing straight into a Sonos Play:5 without the need of an amplifier for multiroom larks.

Band together

Since you’ll be pumping the AT-LP3 through what is effectively a one-box speaker – or a series of them if you’ve really gone all in with Sonos – its shortcomings won’t be as noticeable as they would be on hardcore hi-fi gear. This turntable’s soundstage and detail are really quite becoming. Audio-technica has clearly put a great deal of effort into ensuring the character of your vintage vinyl is maintained.

Looking for an entry-level turntable to slot right into your existing multiroom setup? Since the AT-LP3 is hassle-free and flexible enough to be upgraded at a later date, this is the option to plump for. We’re big fans.

Tech specs

Drive type Belt Speeds supported (rpm) 33⅓, 45 Dimensions 435x353x128mm. 5.2kg