Best budget record players 2025: affordable turntables tried and tested
By Kashfia Kabir | Contributions from Harry McKerrell | WhatHiFi
If you’re looking to get into vinyl but don’t want to spend thousands on the turntable itself, don’t worry – there are plenty of affordable turntables available that are well-made, sound good and will make your freshly bought records sing.
We have dedicated this page to the best-performing turntables (also called record players) that fall under the £500/$500 mark, and include purist hi-fi designs, record players with fuss-free automatic operation, built-in phono stages and even convenient Bluetooth streaming you can create a tidy, compact vinyl set up.
There are plenty of budget turntables on the market these days, but many are of poor build quality and deliver poor performance. A feature-packed ultra-budget deck may seem like a great deal, but considering how pricey vinyl records themselves are these days, it is worthwhile to ensure that the turntable, no matter how cheap, is built to a good standard so it can play your records as accurately as possible and without damaging them. Essentially, it’s no point paying for a budget turntable if you can’t hear the benefit of the physical format – you might as well stick to basic Bluetooth streaming.
We have dedicated this page to the best-performing turntables (also called record players) that fall under the £500/$500 mark. All models have been reviewed by our experienced in-house team and in dedicated test rooms, so you know you’ll be getting genuine first-hand advice. You can read more about our turntable testing process and get in-depth advice about choosing your turntable, or simply scroll down to see our favourite budget record players we heartily recommend.
The best budget tuntable for beginners
Lenco L-85
The cheapest plug-and-plug turntable for beginners.
Specifications
Type : Belt drive
Operation: Semi-automatic
Speeds : 33 ⅓, 45
Speed change : Manual
Cartridge : Moving magnet
Phono stage : Yes
USB : Yes
Bluetooth : No
Dimensions (hwd): 42 x 36.2 x 12 cm
Weight : 2.61kg
Finishes: 5 (black, white, grey, green, red)
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Reasons to buy
+
Enjoyable sound for the money+
Good with voices+
User friendly+
Very cheap
Reasons to avoid
–
Rivals offer better overall sound-
Very much a cheap option
If budget really does mean budget, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better plug-and-play turntable than Lenco’s eye-catching, cheap-and-cheerful L-85, which can often be found at prices between £80 to £130. The semi-automatic, belt-driven turntable features a built-in phono stage and even supports USB recording so you can rip vinyl into MP3 files, so a desire to save money doesn’t starve you of features. Even the plastic build quality is decent for the price, and various colour options are theoretically plentiful, although you might have to shop around to find the shade you want from the retailer who will actually provide it (this model has been around since 2016).
There are plenty of trendy, cheap turntables available that sound poor at best or damage our vinyl at worst, but this Lenco does what the others haven’t been able to: deliver a likeable, enjoyable sound in a competent manner – without, crucially, gouging our precious records. This isn’t the sort of turntable that’s going to blow you away with incomparable sonic heft and detail to make a sound engineer swoon, but for this price, you could certainly do a lot worse.
The Lenco L-85 handles vocals especially well, and while it’s not a remarkable performer for capturing rhythm or timing, the balance across the frequencies is admirably even and there are no coarse edges at the top end. In our original review, we equated the L-85 to the “DUPLO blocks you’d play with as a child before graduating onto proper LEGO sets”, calling it a “beginner’s turntable that gives you all the basics with the promise of more exciting things, while still being enjoyable in its own right.”
Whether it’s for your kids or you’re a student keen on vinyl but needing to save money, this is a decent place to start.
Read the full Lenco L-85 review