Unboxing the Music Hall US-1 Turntable - Part 1

As may be readily apparent to our more experienced clients and viewers, this is my first experience with setting up a turntable. However, I found it a fun and enjoyable experience nonetheless! Unboxing and setting a turntable is a great experience that I highly recommend for any person interested in diving into the world of music and is a must have experience for any audiophile. And the US-1 is an excellent entry piece that is affordable, easy to set up, and extremely rewarding for a beginner turntable enthusiast! 

This product is considered an entry-level piece, both for its price ($199 as of this posting) as well at its performance. It also gives the listener excellent sound quality and exceeded all my expectations in terms of its aesthetic design and presentation! To begin, the packaging on all of the Music Hall turntables is phenomenal! They have recently been picked up for distribution by MOFI Electronics, which has done a fantastic job managing this well-known brand since Roy Hall (the previous owner of Music Hall) retired in mid-2024. Turntables can be cumbersome to pack and ship, but the packaging on these units is just plain exceptional. Most models are double or even triple boxed to prevent any damage in shipping and the quality of packaging is beyond what you usually see with electronics. After speaking with MOFI about this, they explained that they wanted to do their very best to prevent any damage to the units and this is definitely apparent in the packaging. 

Moving onto the unit itself, the design and finish are beautiful. The US-1 has a classic design with a black lacquer finish and clear dust cover. The body is made of plastic but still looks good. The 4 feet are self-leveling and provide some vibration dampening which helps to prevent skips when playing the album. However, this a belt-driven manual turntable, so some vibration is to be expected. When set up on a level and stable surface, I don't envision anyone having too many issues in this regard. Everything needed to setup the turntable is inside in the box, making this a true plug and play system (besides the speakers, of course) and after the speed of the platter has been adjusted and the stylus dialed in.

The cartridge is an Audio Technica Cartridge pre-installed on the headshell which seems to be a relatively generic model of headshell. Even though the cartridge is factory mounted, I would still recommend you take the time to double-check the alignment to make sure it is properly aligned for placement on the vinyl. Most Music Hall Turntables include an alignment protractor with their products for this purpose. However, you will also need a stylus force gauge to check the stylus force. The Audio Technica Cartridge has a style force range of between 3-4g and this force is important to ensure the highest quality playback and to prevent damage to your albums. Digital scales work best but a manual scale like the Rek-o-Kut Stylus Force Gauge (used in this video) work well too.

The US-1 also has a built-in phono stage. Therefore, you won't require a preamp and the US-1 can be plugged directly into your speakers in the line-level input. Because the Kanto YU4 Speakers in this video also have a built-in phono stage, it was necessary to select the line-level input. This means you are bypassing the phono stage on the speakers and essentially, treating the turntable as if it were any other line-level audio source (like a CD Player). If you select the phono line on your speakers, the playback will cause distortion and sound just plain bad due to the excessive amplification of the signal. For other turntables that don't have a built-in phono stage you would select the phono line instead. 

The only real issue that I had with this turntable was with the speed adjustment sensitivity. It was very difficult to get the strobe effect to become nullified. While the unit includes the speed strobe light, the sensitivity of the adjustment knob on this unit was frustrating. I believe this portion of the setup took longer than any other portion overall. However, once the speed was set (as closely as I could get it) and the turntable was fully set up, it was off to the races!  I really enjoyed the sound quality and performance of this turntable, and I highly recommend the Music Hall US-1 to any beginner audiophile just starting their journey toward finding the perfect sound!