I was just wondering at what point to set up an equalizer for a turntable setup. I’m moving into a bigger place soon and will be taking my grandfather’s old equalizer and speakers from the 80s (not audiophile quality I’m sure but it’s free and I can upgrade in the future when I have more disposable income). I know typically you’d have the turntable plugged into a pre-amp, that plugged into an amp/receiver and that plugged into speakers. I tried looking it up online but all I found was either explanations on how to use an equalizer, or people talking about whether a specific equalizer was good or bad. Where in the “chain” of components would the equalizer go? I’m quite new to home theatre setup obviously. The only turntable setup I’ve ever used had an equalizer built into the receiver so that was simpler to put together.
This is my first post here so hopefully this is the right community to ask the question to
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IMO it depends on your setup, goals, and the specific equipment in question.
- The turntable is the only thing you’re amplifying and your amp has a built in phono preamp? You’ll want the preamp between the two, just know that your EQ will go through the RIAA Curve in your phono preamplifier, so you’ll be making small changes at say 100 Hz and bigger changes at say 1 kHz
- The turntable is the only thing you’re amplifying and you have a dedicated phono preamplifier (or it’s built into your record player). Put the EQ after the phono preamplifier
- You also want to amplify other audio sources. In this case I hope you have a dedicated phono preamp or your record player has line level outputs. You’ll want to go record player to phono preamp to mixer (a receiver will work here) to the equalizer to the amplifier. Depending on the receiver in question, you might be able to do something like use tape monitor to feed the signal back into your receiver
If the EQ is scratchy, hit the pits with some kind of contact cleaner. Give them a quick lube once clean. This can be it’s own rabbit hole, so I’ll leave you to google/DDG/etc.
Awesome, thanks for the detailed response. I appreciate it.
Equalizer goes directly after the turntable, then into the pre-amp.
