I bought a new turntable! It’s a vintage Technics SL-5, circa 1981 or so. A linear-tracking table, it doesn’t have a tone arm; instead, the cartridge is pulled sideways along a track built into the lid. That makes for better sound because your needle is always directly in the center of a record’s groove from start to finish; with a tonearm, your needle always rides in the groove at an ever-changing angle. While it looks like a toy, it is actually a highly regarded table and I’ve occasionally looked at them online for years but never pulled the trigger on buying one due to a bad previous experience buying a turntable without seeing it in person first. This one, I found in a vinyl shop in a Washington, DC and couldn’t believe I’d found one, much less in such gorgeous shape. Lacking a bag or box to put it in, I had to carry it in my arms through the streets and on the train back to New York; luckily, it survived. It has a special feature that even the designers didn’t know about—it’s small enough to fit into a modern-day IKEA Expedit/Kallax record shelf (the shelves didn’t exist back then). Of course, everything’s better with tacky LED lights so I adorned it with some underneath and now it has this otherworldly glow. Most importantly, it sounds awesome!

