Fluance RT81+

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Specs

Description

My turntable, the one that replaced the Kenwood P-110. I'm using the built-in preamp for now, but I should replace it soon with a Fosi X5.

I bought the Kenwood first to test whether I would actually like this vinyl hobby, listening to music in the analog way. I didn't know if I'd enjoy it or not, so I paid super cheap for the Kenwood, and I think it lasted three days before I already wanted a much better turntable. Mine was skipping and drifting, and having to babysit the turntable the whole time while listening to a record is pretty annoying. The Fluance is not cheap, and this one is the RT81+, which is even more expensive, but it was a gift, so I didn't really choose it.

It's a belt drive deck with a heavy aluminium platter and an acrylic mat on top of it that keeps everything completely flat. The feet are adjustable and sprung, with a small conical contact point, and it comes with a bubble level, an adjustable counterweight and anti-skate. The cartridge is an Audio-Technica AT-VM95E, the green one, and the stylus is elliptical, 0.3 x 0.7 mil. The whole VM95 series shares the same cartridge body, so the six styli are interchangeable, the blue conical one, the brown Shibata and so on.

Impressions

It's excellent, I think it's one of the best turntables in this price range, and it was a great buy. It's also extremely beautiful and it goes super well with my audio room setup, because I have an oak sideboard and the turntable has that wood colour. The only problem is that it isn't matte, it's completely glossy, so it gets dirty quite a lot, mostly handprints and cat hair.

It's extremely simple to operate, even though it's fully manual, which I find a bit annoying because I have to keep raising and lowering the needle myself. The elliptical stylus is much more faithful to what it can pick up from the grooves inside the vinyl, so I get much better sound quality for a price that's relatively cheap for a turntable. Other turntables with these same qualities are a lot more expensive, including Fluance's own.

I did a good amount of research before this, although it's only my second turntable, so I don't have much to compare against. Starting with the feet, they're adjustable and they have springs, so it's kind of immune to vibration even if you put the speakers, in my case the Argons, on the same table and they're vibrating a lot. The feet are also sort of conical, they look like an ice cream cone, and because the contact point with the table is so small it doesn't skip. I actually thought my records were bad, because the other turntable was skipping a lot, but that wasn't it. The moment I swapped to this one they started playing perfectly, like they were new.

I also like that it's a belt drive, so it doesn't have that motor vibration, even if it's a bit weaker in general. Getting it configured and levelled is a bit annoying, though the little bubble level it comes with is something I've found much more useful for a lot of other things, not just for levelling the turntable. The counterweight is adjustable, so I can put more or less weight on the record, and there's the anti-skate, which I think does a lot to stop the record jumping from one side to the other. I don't know exactly how it works, I'm pretty noob when it comes to this kind of technology, but I'm extremely happy with it and I don't see any reason to swap it for another one. Right now it does everything I wanted.

One of the big advantages of this Fluance is that I can replace the whole cartridge. On some others, like the more entry level Audio-Technica decks, you can't, so you're kind of stuck at that level of upgrade. Here I can change both the stylus and the complete cartridge, which is very interesting, because if I want to try other types of cartridge later, like a moving coil instead of a moving magnet, it would be much easier. I do intend to buy a next stylus, one of those Shibata ones, and see how that works, but for now it's great.

So I have nothing to complain about. It sounds really nice and it already has an internal preamp, so I don't need an external phono amp. I'm still going to put an external one in, because these internal preamps usually aren't as good as the external ones, but this one is doing the job. I'll probably try to build a preamp myself, to learn how that works too.

Related

• Kenwood P-110
• KRK Rokit 5
• Creative Pebble
• Argon Audio 7350A
• Focusrite Scarlett Solo 2nd Gen
• Behringer Xenyx 802