INITIAL SETUP
Just turn it on and connect to your Bluetooth speaker, right? Not quite…
The Audio-Technica was a doddle to fire up. Just pair it and you’re away
The promise of Bluetooth record players is to do away with the inconvenience that used to be synonymous with these devices. However, while they undoubtedly make placement easier – you can put them anywhere you like, with no need to consider the position of your speaker/s – there are some new setup issues to consider.
The main one of these is that connecting via Bluetooth without using a phone, laptop or anything else with a screen is not entirely straightforward. You need to put whatever you’re pairing with into pairing mode, then activate pairing on the turntable, then wait for it to pair. This sounds simple enough, but with no indication that anything at all is happening, it’s actually rather stressful.
If you then want to pair with a second device – headphones, say – you will need to turn off the device you already paired with in order to repeat the process. More problematic, when you then re-pair with either your speaker or your headphones, the other device will need to be turned off, or the turntable may pair with the ‘wrong’ device. With no app, you can’t just switch between devices in the way you’re used to.
All that said, Audio-Technica’s AT-LP60XBT was an absolute doddle to fire up. You can literally take it out of the box, follow the Bluetooth pairing process/es detailed
above and you’re away. There’s no tone arm setup – it’s just there – and attaching the rubber belt to the platter, while fiddly, is easy enough.
Cambridge Audio’s Alva TT has slightly fiddlier Bluetooth setup, and you need to calibrate the tone arm. This is fairly straightforward, but it must be said that most tech these days does not find you balancing an arm on a funny little plastic see-saw thing, to ensure the ‘down force’ is correct. Vinyl veterans will love it; anyone who’s grown up in the digital age may feel perplexed.
Pro-Ject’s deck is the biggest pain to set up. You have to manually balance the tone arm, there’s a counterweight on a piece of fishing line that needs to be fitted – yes, really – and the belt drive needs to be stretched into place. Oh, and there are two power switches.
Bluetooth pairing doesn’t even involve a button, never mind a display, which caused much head-scratching here. However, once setup is complete, you never really need to worry about any of this again.