The SL-1710 is as good or better than the Rega P3 assuming its bearings are good.

If you’re in the US I would not consider Rega. Their price disadvantage here is very steep (the closest matches on features and quality from other brands usually cost about 60% as much) and they lack key features for flexibility and upgradability that you should not be going without in the $1000+ bracket, like adjustable VTA and adjustable azimuth. And the VTA issue in particular will mess you up if you have any intent to use any cartridge not made by Rega (such as a Denon), because their tonearms are set up for their house cartridge height of 14mm, and pretty much all other companies’ carts are 17-18mm or so. (I believe this is true of the Rega OEM arm on the Avid as well, though I can’t find the full specs of that Avid cart.) You’d need to add a spacer to get things aligned.

If you’re in the UK… all this stuff is still true except the pricing part of it. Regas in the UK compete with other brands’ models at more like 80% of the price, not 60%.

Both of those reads are wrong.

There are many people into hifi as a hobby who are not after absolute accuracy, and there are also many established, widely respected hifi brands who don’t pursue absolute accuracy in their speaker designs. And I would say the increasingly dominant approach in this hobby, even for the people who are more analytically minded, is to pursue a response that takes cues from one of several psychoacoustic response curves… which are not flat.

And I don’t think there are any experienced mix engineers who just want louder and louder sound. Maybe that’s true of teenagers who are spending money from their summer job on some KRK Rokits at Guitar Center… but music mixing is an actual job, and good mix engineers want one thing from their monitoring, which is mix translation. You want your monitoring to be accurate, with minimal coloration of its own, so that when you play your track back on a different system, you don’t end up with completely unpredictable results. If your system has major nonlinearities and idiosyncrasies that you have to compensate for to get things to sound right, those compensations (which apply to your system and yours only) will end up baked into your mix, and your mixes will translate poorly to any other setup. That means your records will sound bad, and you won’t get hired again.

This is not the right sub for this question… you need to be asking people experienced in music mixing, not home stereo hobbyists.

Try r/audioengineering or r/wearethemusicmakers.

Don’t be a passive aggressive vindictive shut-in prick.

TALK

TO

YOUR

NEIGHBORS.

With amps this old it largely comes down to their condition internally. Even if the exterior looks great, ~50 years is old enough for there to be a decent chance that the capacitors inside will be significantly degraded, and you might end up with distortion or a channel imbalance or some other issue. So don’t buy it unless you can test it first. Getting an amp restored/recapped can be done, but it can be costly if you aren’t able to do it yourself.

Assuming it’s in full working order, be aware that with an original rating of only 13 watts and some speakers that are quite small, your volume will be limited. This combo would not rock the house in a medium to large room. For a smaller space or lower listening levels it would be fine, but whenever you start to push higher volumes, pay close attention to the sound. If you hear anything sounding wrong, like any artifacts that sound like fuzz or popping or tearing during the loud parts of music, you need to back off on the volume ASAP to avoid damaging your speakers.

The DSD remastering of the Depeche Mode catalog (up to the early ‘00s I think) that was done for the SACD reissues sounds amazing… I couldn’t imagine better.

That said, you don’t need to actually seek it out in DSD format. The CD downconversions also sound incredible, and those are the ones that are now available on streaming services (if you’re playing the actual albums, not a compilation). So most of their catalog now sounds awesome even on Spotify 320kbps.

Not a surprise. Rotel is an electronics company that sells big, chunky amps with big transformers and big heatsinks. Rega is a tonearm company that has a line of overpriced fashion amps in half-height enclosures that have no room for adequate transformers and heatsinks.

You can’t skimp on current delivery and thermals and expect a class AB amp to do well… not at higher volumes anyway. I’m sure the Regas sound great in quiet, treated showrooms at short distances.