Vinyl at its worst is still something special – just ask my seven-year-old

A few years ago, I somewhat infamously declared that I would never own a turntable.

My main arguments were that turntables just aren’t really compatible with life with a toddler, and that I simply couldn’t afford to embark upon a new hobby as expensive as collecting vinyl.

Quite rightly, I was called out by a few people for not even trying out the whole experiment.

So, for Vinyl Week 2026, I decided to give it a go, and, despite everything about my current set-up being objectively wrong for vinyl, I’ve ended up loving it for reasons that have surprisingly little to do with sound quality

What’s more, if my family has anything to do with it, the turntable will be staying.

Analogue over the airwaves

Since I wrote that last piece about my issues with turntables, my family and I have moved to a bigger house that is theoretically roomy enough for more lovely home cinema and hi-fi kit.

My then dangerously inquisitive and clumsy toddler is also now a relatively sensible seven-year-old who can be fairly relied upon to take care of the various electronic bits and pieces that often find themselves living in or visiting our lounge.

On the other hand, though, I promised when we moved to this new house that I wouldn’t turn the living room into a full-bore cinema, and so my carefully hybridised hi-fi and AV system, which featured 11 speakers and a subwoofer, went into storage and was replaced with a much neater and tidier (and remarkably impressive) Sony HT-A9 system consisting of four wireless speakers and an optional subwoofer.

As brilliant for our needs as the HT-A9 has been, it presented an immediate obstacle to my vinyl experiment: it doesn’t have an analogue audio input. In fact, it doesn’t have any digital audio inputs, either – it’s a pure, simplified, HDMI-only affair.

While RCA-to-HDMI converters do exist, I don’t much like the sound of using one of those. Besides, all of my HDMI sockets are already occupied.

Thankfully, very good Bluetooth turntables now exist, and Bluetooth is something that the HT-A9 does support. So, after a quick call to Kashfia Kabir, my cracking counterpart on What Hi-Fi?’s hi-fi side, a loan of the five-star Pro-Ject T1 Evo BT had been arranged.

A vinyl introduction and spousal approval

An added benefit of going wireless was that I didn’t need to make space for the turntable on the overburdened rack at the front of the room by the TV.

Instead, I could place it on another unit towards the back of the room, next to books, family photos and some sort of fancy air freshener arrangement that I’ve chosen never to ask about.

Rather than object to this invasion of the less gadgety end of our living room, my long-suffering wife immediately approved with a “that looks great!”

I think it helped that the Pro-Ject is a very handsome turntable, particularly in the walnut finish of our review sample, but one of the great things about record players in general is that, unlike almost any other source component, they tend to aesthetically enhance a room.

My son, who is so used to me boxing and unboxing bits of kit in our living room that he hadn’t even taken any notice of proceedings until this point, then looked up from his Nintendo Switch to ask, “What’s that?”

“It’s a turntable”, I replied. “It plays music”.

“Does it play CDs?” he asked.

“No, it plays vinyl records, which are similar but also entirely different,” I said, slightly surprised he was even aware of CDs.

Having predicted this degree of inquisitiveness, I then played my trump card and handed him a flat, square Amazon package to open. Inside, he found a brilliantly bright and colourful copy of the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack.

Excited, he asked, “Is it a CD?”

“No, son, it’s a record”, I replied, before carefully extracting the black disc (I couldn’t afford the fancy coloured version), holding it close to him, pointing to the groove and briefly trying to explain how vinyl works.

“It’s cool that you get this extra stuff with it,” he said, turning his attention away from the boring dad-splanation and towards the poster and card that came in the package.

And fair enough, I thought. Part of the joy of vinyl is undeniably the artwork, the physicality of it and the fact that little extras are often included.

Besides, his attention quickly returned to the record as I placed it on the platter, set it spinning and moved the tonearm into place.

Bluetooth surprises and limitations

Kash had warned me that Bluetooth turntables can be a bit of a pain in the bum. None of them (at least as far as I’m aware) have screens to assist in the pairing process, for starters, so making the connection can be tricky.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, that when I put the Sony HT-A9 into Bluetooth pairing mode and flicked the Bluetooth switch on the Pro-Ject, the two simply connected almost immediately. And, in fact, whenever I now turn the turntable on, the HT-A9 automatically powers up and switches to its Bluetooth input. Neat.

After a tiny bit of lovely, soft, vinyl crackle, Takedown started blaring out of the Sony speakers, and within a few seconds, both my wife and son declared that it sounded great.

I didn’t have the heart to point out that I’d spotted – and heard – a problem.

You see, because the HT-A9 is a home cinema system, it tells you what’s playing on the connected TV, and in the top-right corner of the screen, it was telling me that the Bluetooth signal being received had a data rate of just 327Kbps.

That’s MP3 quality, and while I had to agree with my family that a certain amount of vinyl charm was still present in what we were hearing, and that it sounded surprisingly dynamic given the amount of compression going on, it wasn’t doing anywhere near justice to the source – or getting close to the quality of streaming an uncompressed digital track to the system.

The problem, it turns out, is that while the Pro-Ject turntable supports aptX HD, the Sony system doesn’t support aptX at all. Instead, it predictably favours Sony’s own LDAC codec, which the Pro-Ject does not. This meant that the devices were falling back on basic, very compressed, SBC Bluetooth.

The solution? There isn’t one really. At least not with my system as it stands.

Bitten by the bug

Importantly, though, this limitation wasn’t actually ruining our enjoyment of the listening experience, and we spent a full afternoon swapping out records and properly focusing on music in a way that, as a family, we very rarely have before.

And that made me realise that there are benefits to having a turntable that go beyond audio quality. My son had literally never interacted with physical music media until this point – music to him had always been instant, invisible and infinitely skippable – and his fascination with the artwork, the spinning record and the turntable mechanism was a joy to behold.

We were suddenly listening to whole albums again, as well, and after my little boy got over his shock that he couldn’t simply skip a track he wasn’t keen on, this became a blessing, too.

So, as I mentioned, both my wife and son, to my great surprise, are very keen to keep hold of the turntable as long as possible, and my son has said that he’d like to start collecting vinyl.

I’m absolutely thrilled with that. No, I can’t afford to support an extensive record-collecting habit, but a new album every 2-3 months or so? I can probably do that. And I’m reminded that that is pretty much how I collected and consumed music when I was young, albeit on cassettes and then CDs.

Next steps

Of course, keeping the (or ‘a’) turntable does still present a problem: while my family might love the way it sounds currently, I’m much more aware of how much it’s being compromised, and I can’t live with that.

I don’t want to start from scratch, though, and, as I’ve mentioned, the Sony HT-A9 system has been brilliant for us.

The solution I’ve come up with, then, is to look into adding a pair of wireless, powered hi-fi speakers just for music.

I’ve long admired KEF’s LSX models, and while these don’t support aptX, they do have an optical input, into which I could connect an aptX HD-compatible Bluetooth receiver.

The brand’s newer Coda W speakers are bigger and less visually exotic than the LSX II LTs, but they do support aptX HD. They could be a solution, although they don’t have built-in streaming capabilities, which would be handy to have as well.

Alternatively, I could save some money and look at the Ruark MR1 Mk3 speakers, which also support aptX HD right out of the box. I’m slightly concerned that they may not be beefy enough for my relatively large living room, but I won’t know unless I try.

So, yes, it’s system upgrade time, and you could say that taking the Pro-Ject turntable home has actually created a headache for me. I don’t see it like that, though.

For starters, researching and trying out new bits of kit is the biggest thrill of this hobby of ours, and my system has been static for a while now. It’s nice to have a new project.

Most of all, though, this experiment has inspired my wife and I to change the way we consume music, at least some of the time.

My son, meanwhile, has discovered a whole new way to interact with music that reminds me of how I fell in love with artists and albums when I was young, and that’s something I’m keen to nurture and support as much as possible.

So, while a few years ago I was adamant I’d never own a turntable, I'm now figuring out how to build a system around one – and, more importantly, how to share it.

MORE:

Check out all of our Vinyl Week coverage

Here are the best Bluetooth turntables you can buy right now

Have a read of our full Pro-Ject T1 Evo BT review