Any recommendations on a turntable phone pre-amp, for an AV receiver that has no phono input?

Okay, Costco had a really good deal on an AV home theater receiver, and I went ahead and purchased it - actually it was a Christmas gift, and yeah, I only opened the box now to set it up, which is my bad. It's a nice mid-level receiver (not super audiofile, but decent, especially for the price), and I want to use it for the front living room area here at Casa de Mai Tai.

So I opened up the box yesterday, and realized that the receiver has no dedicated phono input specifically for a turntable. I have a cool old german Dual 1219 turntable that I wanted to use through this receiver, because I was planning on listening to a lot of vinyl in that room! I tried hooking up the turntable anyways, and there is hardly enough signal being sent to the receiver, so you can barely hear a vinyl record even when the amp is cranked to eleven.

My choices at this point are to either try to return this receiver to Costco, which they probably won't take back because they have been cracking down heavily on their 90 day return policy, or get a phono pre-amp to connect between the turntable and the receiver.

If anyone has a recommendation on a good phono pre-amp that doesn't cost a fortune, I'd like to hear it. I can spend a little bit on a pre-amp, but don't want one in the hundred to hundreds of dollars range, especially if it were to cost more than the turntable or a new receiver!

not sure, but try Radio Shack.
good luck.
Viva Vinyl

Jeff(btd)

Magnolia Hi Fi has a couple, but they start at $150, and go up from there. I need something cheaper. I could buy a DJ mixing board for that price. (I do need a new DJ mixing board, btw, so that is an option).

Most of the phono preamps under $100 are not so good. Unless you can listen to it first or find some objective reviews of a model you had in mind, you might want to avoid it. Of course depending on what you're going to do with it makes a difference. If you need it for DJing over a PA in a noisy club, then the cheapest one out there might be fine. However, if that's what you need it for, then like you said, just hold off and get the dj mixer.

If your plans involve critical listening or archiving you definitely want to be more selective.

A number of years ago I started digitizing some of my vinyl collection, stuff not available on cd. After reading all the reviews and knowing I couldn't afford the best high end audiophile preamp, I settled on a Parasound PPH-100 phono preamp which I purchased new for just under $100. I'm happy with it. It handles moving coil cartridges as well as moving magnet cartridges.
Sometimes they turn up used for even less. Used phono preamps from NAD or Creek are sometimes a good deal too. keep an eye on audiogon.com. In the meantime, just by a cheapo $10 one off ebay like this: http://tinyurl.com/mul9o3

I will be using it mainly for listening at home, and archiving. I used to be a DJ way back in the day, pre dot com bubble, and I've been thinking about doing that again for fun and a little side cash, since I still have all of my vinyl from back in the day, and an enormous collection of 7 inch 45's that I both collected and inherited. I still have some of my old DJ rig, but the mixing board is permanently broken. So I will most likely go out and buy a new mixing board just for DJ'ing purposes.

However, that Parasound preamp sounds good, and versatile, and I would have a need for that, because I have two turntables with moving magnet cartridges, and one turntable with a moving coil cartridge. I will definitely look into that one. I will most likely buy something from my friendly neighborhood stereo hi fi store that deals with a lot of vinyl and turntable equipment, the Sound Well in Berkeley. They are my go-to place for replacement needles, cartridges, as well as some hard to find items. They would most likely have nice new and used preamps, and maybe they'll have something at a good price. They're closed during the week, not open until Thursday, though, so I'll have to wait patiently until then.

You'd think with vinyl being one of the main things I was going to be playing, that I would have made sure that the amplifier would have had some type of phono inputs. I just assumed that all of the nicer receivers still had them, but I definitely assumed wrong. Let this be a warning for any of you folks that still spin vinyl, not all higher end receivers have phono inputs anymore, and that's kind of a shame, like the final end to an era. It kind of makes me want to return the receiver altogether, and buy a nice vintage tube based amp, or a newer model used McIntosh or similar (like I can afford that right now). Eventually, long term, that is the plan.

Until then, keep those suggestions for a preamp coming!

The other thing you can do is just get any decent older receiver/amp on craigslist. You could either use that as your main receiver and return the new one, or just use it as a preamp with the tape rec line out going straight to one of the line-ins on your new receiver.

Dunno how hi you want your fi (remember, "hi-fi is short for high finance"), but there's lots of older receivers on the cheap that work perfectly fine. Back in the days when receiver/amps were for listening to music instead of all the home theater 7.12 channel surround-o-phonic multi-zone stuff.

-Randy