Should You Have Turntables In Your Home Studio?

If you ask 100 people what equipment belongs in a home recording studio, you’ll get 100 different answers. Some pieces of equipment everyone can agree on.

You definitely need a sound mixer in your studio. You also want speakers and at least one microphone. A good keyboard is also essential, so you can use it to mimic various instruments and also to lay down beats. Speaking of instruments, it could never hurt to have a couple of those too.

And, of course, a good coffee machine. Even better, a really good espresso machine. Because caffeinated artists are happy artists. And if that caffeine came from a really good cup of coffee or espresso made with a high quality coffee maker, so much the better.

But what about turntables? Does a record player bring anything to the table? Yes, it does. Obviously, you can use it to play samples from vinyl records. Of course you can also play digital samples or, as mentioned above, use a keyboard or various instruments. But sometimes you want to have a record player for that.

But what a turntable really gives you is the ability to scratch. You might want to have some scratch examples in your music and a turntable allows you to do that. There are also a lot of records that you might not find digitally or on another medium. Having a way to play those vinyl records can always be useful.

Beyond that, you can just use your record player to play music. Often when you’re recording in the studio, there are a lot of breaks where you are not actually doing any recording. You’re talking and discussing or maybe just eating lunch. It is nice during those times to have some music.

Of course you could just play the music any other way. I mean, come on, your in an actual recording studio. But there is just something special about music played on a vinyl record player. It just feels more like real music for some reason. If you don’t have a record player you can’t enjoy that. But if you do have one, it will add a lot of atmosphere to your studio and, I believe, it will do a lot to foster creativity in anyone working there.

The Best Record Players

So now that you’ve decided you want a record player, what is the best kind? These days there are so many different ones that it can be hard to choose. Just look at the samples on this site: http://toprecordplayers.com.

The biggest difference between them is in quality and in the features. There are a lot of record players that have tons of features. They play CDs, they play radio, they can record to or from the digital format and many of them have internal speakers.

While these models are very multi-functional, even the more expensive ones are generally not that great in terms of sound quality. There are simply too many features that the developers focused on. If they had focused on only one thing, they would generally do that one thing better. It is for this reason that one of these all-in-one units is not preferable. Plus, you’re in a recording studio, so do you really need speakers on a record player? No, you don’t. You could just plug it into your already existing system it will sound much better.

For that reason, I suggest getting a turntable with very close to no features whatsoever. Get one that simply plays records and perhaps one that allows you to scratch. Beyond that it doesn’t need to do much.

Now you do want to get a pretty high-quality one, but you don’t have to spend a ton of money for this. Obviously there are some very expensive ones that are incredible, but a simple one from Audio Technica will suffice for your purposes here. The cheapest one cost less than $100 and the next step up cost under 300. I would get the one under 300. It will give you an incredible sound quality and has a ton of features that you might find useful. It is probably the best value record player money can get you.

If you really want to go expensive, then you could spend several thousand dollars. You will get a much better sound quality, but these record players are not really meant to scratch. For that you would be better off with the cheaper Audio Technica turntable. That would be my choice for a home recording studio, if I ever have enough money to open up my dream studio.