@mattl,
My point in posting the Walmart cheapie was that someone buying a garage sale turntable or something from a thrift store is not going to want to spend $$$ on a preamp just too sample the TT's performance.
Time moves on and so have I. I have a stack of 4 or 5 TTs in a closet somewhere, all very high end stuff at the time, but I can't recall the last time I've wanted to play a disk. Got hundreds in a closet too. The ease of streaming audio has me firmly in it's grips. The sound quality is decent, not high quality by any means, but the trade off is worth it for me. I can get virtually anything I want on Pandora, or any of the hundreds of streaming stations. I do play it back on very good quality audio systems, though most music today is consumed on iphone, and the like with poor audio quality.
Now retuning you to your regularly scheduled thread....
^ not even close, streaming absolutely sucks donkey gonads compared to a decent turntable. I'm discovering also that MP3/Streaming is extremly hard on tweeters, there's too much distortion in the high end. What's even worse is that a good, commercially produced CASSETTE can outdo streaming.
@mikael3
I've used both. Honestly, I prefer the Sunbeam. I find that the Westy can run slightly hotter than the Sunbeam. Also, the Westy's more open base makes it more difficult to clean. It's too easy to get water in the base by accident and they DON'T like that at all. It can cause alot of problems.
My Westy was an Ebay deal, and I think it was ever used. When I first turned it on, it had the new appliance smell.