Stanton ST150 Turntable

Vinyl might be on its way out but this is still a fantastic turntable in several ways.

For starters, the torque makes the platter feel very responsive, much more so than a 1200. This means you make less corrections to your mixing or scratching from accidentally touching the platter or pushing it too hard, and if you're already used to 1200s your djing will be extra tight.

This also uses the same technology as the 1200 on the motor and platter design, featuring a magnet attached to the platter to drive it. Technics have been using this ever since the 1200 first came out and it makes this deck incredibly reliable and the speed consistent.

The turntable has a built in phono amp which means switchable line level output! It sounds great as well, you'd need to spend a lot of money on a mixer or phono amplifier to get similar quality. It also has coaxial S/PDIF in case you have something with that available. This could be your go-to unit for archiving your vinyl, it comes with a very good cartridge and it has a very good phono preamp so all you need is a sound card and you're good to go!

I will admit I don't use the extra features on the deck that much - the start/stop times are set to their minimum values, I almost never touch the reverse, the key lock is unusable for anything other than an effect on speeds greater than +/-3% and I usually stick to the 8% pitch range - but they're nice to have when you figure out something cool to put in a routine which is easy when your deck has the feature already. For example, putting the deck on the wrong speed then pitching a break or something using the pitch fader to the right speed with key lock on sounds pretty funky sometimes.

I've owned a pair of these for about 3 years and they still work really well, they're excellent turntables and I'm very happy I bought them.

only a n00b, but played w/ for about 15 hours now and rocks...
i'm no craze yet but one day damn you!!
torque is strong as, havent played with key lock (running phono), and the included 680 cartridges are awesome, using traktor w/ some occassional scratching, but also used on practice scratches.
not cheap unless you score on a discount!!!