Audio Technica AT LP70XBT Turntable review with a guest appearance by my black cat - Poppy

This is my unboxing and review of the AT LP70XBT Automatic Belt Drive Turntable from Audio-Technica. This is my first new turntable in quite awhile, going to use it to play some of my more obscure records. Some of these records never made it to CD or the streaming services, so it will be good to hear these vinyl rarities again. My Bombay Black Cat made a guest appearance and contributed her two cents to the review.

The Audio-Technica Fully Automatic Belt-Drive Turntable is a good looking turntable which has a black plastic finish with a dark gold band around it. I really like how this turntable looks with my TV stand, which has the same color scheme. Nothing extraordinary about this turntable, it has two standard speeds 33rpm and 45 rpm, the latter which I do not have any 45s from back in the day.

In any case the turntable comes in a few different pieces, a base with the motor and all the mechanical items, an aluminum platter and a felt mat where you place the record for playing. It was fairly easy to assemble with, although you need to place the belt around the spindle of the motor, which take a bit of skill, you have to ensure the belt does not get twisted. Also, the clear dust cover attaches to the base of the turntable via two provided hinges. The turntable includes an integrated stylus (needle) to pick up the sound from your records. Back in the day “Direct drive” used to be the sign of a premium, maintenance free turntable, however maybe things have changed and belt driven are preferable. Also on turntable of the past you used to have a standard fitting for a cartridge (stylus) and as they were interchangeable there were actually numerous brands of cartridges. As for this Audio-Technica it seems to have an integrated one (perhaps proprietary). On the back of the turntable there is a switch you can change the output from a standard “phono” input (where your receiver or preamp has a phono equalization circuit to convert the signal from the turntable to something usable) or use the circuitry onboard to send a signal any RCA style input (such as a AUX input).
As for the operation of the turntable, it is automatic, just press the start button and the arm picks itself up and lowers it at the start of your record. There is also a manual queue lever in case you want to manually queue up the record or a specific track (tracks are separated by a visibly smooth circle between tracks - for those new to vinyl records). There is also a stop button which will return the playback arm to the holder and power off the turntable.
I had two issues with the turntable that seemed to resolve themselves, first I could not figure why I was not getting sound fed to my receiver. That took a few minutes to figure out, but finally I determined even though the needle was making contact with the record, somehow it was not in the intended position. I looked at it carefully and used the manual lever to raise the arm, then lower it, the stylus (needle) then seemed to snap into place and I heard sound through my receiver and speakers. The second issue I had was it seemed the speed of my record was slightly faster than it sound be. The pitch (speed) of the record was slightly off. Since there is no pitch adjustment this initially seemed to be a problem. In the old days you would have a strobe light embedded in the platter so that when you adjusted the speed (pitch) a lighted line would sync up and appear to become stationary, indicating a good speed adjustment. In the past the pitch (speed) was also impacted by the frequency of your electrical system (In most parts of the world this is 50 Hz, although in the Americas and parts of Asia it is typically 60 Hz). However, the speed eventually seemed to set itself correctly (perhaps it did some type of calibration) as there is really no way to do this manually if you had to.
If you want a versatile record player this is a good fit, with a basic feature set and components which produce a nice clean playback of your records. For older records I broke out the classic Discwasher (which the bottle of cleaning liquid had long since evaporated)

Pros:
- Nice design and aesthetics
- quality stylus cartridge

Cons
- no manual pitch control
- start and stop buttons are located under the dust cover as opposed to outside of it, this could be an inconvenience.

** I received this unit free of charge from Best Buy for my honest evaluation and review of this product.

[webhype]

I have not run into that yet, but frankly only have about 20 hours of playtime on it. I saw another video suggested by YouTube from someone that has stated that issue. If I run into it I will update this video.

[Buick]

If it skips it could be due to the tonearm tracking force set too light or maybe the built in anti-skate set either too high or too low. Just a guess.

[Boggedy]

Has widespread skipping issues. AVOID.