THE “AUDIOPHILE” MONEY PIT
TLDR: Don't get too hung up on gear and 'high fidelity' - no matter how much you spend on fancy equipment, HiFi nerds will always recommend a better component that requires re-mortgaging your house or selling an organ.
A lot of vocal people on the internet become obsessed with high end gear, specs - and the pursuit of audio fidelity. Although I admire their dedication many get lost down an inescapable rabbit hole and - worst of all - a money pit.
The £1,000 experiment
£1,000 could get you one excellent turntable... or you could buy a very good turntable and very good speakers, and still have £600 left over to spend on records.
The audiophile that picked the £1,000 turntable now has to get an equally high-end amplifier, and speakers, and cables to do their new turntable justice... before they know it they're £5,000 down without buying a single record. When they do start buying records, they'll only want to play high-grade pressings and mint condition ones to protect their mint equipment…
It's not bulletproof, but try thinking about HiFi equipment in terms of the "cost" vs "audio quality". The completely made up graph below is how I perceive the relationship of cost and audio quality for turntables. Obviously, this is a generalisation as you can get decent cheap stuff, or disappointing expensive gear - but those are outliers. This curve could be applied to pretty much everything from speakers, amplifiers, and headphones through to cars, clothing, and furniture.
The last turntable I bought (my third one) was an Audio Technica AT-LP120, usually around £300, but picked up for £250 on sale. It's a copy of the Technics SL-1200, which retails for around £800. I understand that it's not going sound as good, that the parts will be cheaper, and it might not last for 40 years... but I personally can't justify spending over three times the price for something that might sound around 10% better on the same pair of speakers.
The key is finding the sweet spot of what you can afford and what you're happy with. If you will be spending thousands of hours actively listening to records in a controlled environment you will want to save and invest on the highest-quality kit you can afford, but for most people a basic Hi-Fi made with a couple of "very good" or "mid-range" parts will be plenty good enough.
