Terence Eden found a turntable [Amazon] that cost only £30 (~$40): "I accidentally bought a load of vinyl records. So I decided to buy the cheapest, shittiest, turntable possible," he writes. For firty paands he even gets a USB port to rip the records directly to digital. Is it any good? Not really. It plays records 4% too fast and has the slight stereo shift that come with unbalanced tone arms. But it's not terrible, either, Eden reports. It's fine. Eden conducts a complete teardown on the device, which turns out to by mostly air in a plastic box.
Vinyl is not a great format for high-fidelity audio.
In the U.S., the cheapo Jensen "suitcase" turntable [Amazon, but don't] is actually cheaper than the widely-rebranded model Eden found shopping in the U.K. I tried one of the cheap suitcase models and it was just plain bad, requiring coins on the cartridge to keep the needle in the groove, etc.
