When I look at the inexpensive USB turntables available today, the first thought that occurs to me is “what’s the tracking force?” I was around when audiophile-grade turntables were common and fairly inexpensive. The common advice then was to buy a turntable that tracks well with one gram of force or less. You could get one including a decent cartridge for a couple of hundred bucks, in the eighties.
I inherited some records in the 2000s and bought a Numark USB turntable to record them. It seemed like a decent model with a mag cartridge and adjustable tonearm, but the instructions said to set the tracking force to 3.5 to 4G. I was amazed, at that force it seems likely to wipe the grooves clean of high frequency information after a few plays! I tried setting it lower than that, but found that it had serious difficulty staying in the groove.
I began reading more about the current crop of turntables after that, but concern about tracking force appears to be all but gone. I found a good one after some searching, but I had to order it from a retailer in Germany.
