For several years now, I've owned an ION turntable. Yes, it was cheap but it got the job done. One thing that I've noticed, however, is that its frequency response has always been rather poor. Bass was incredibly low and I could hear the record playing at the needle, which always struck me as odd. But at the time I bought it specifically to do some record-to-CD conversions and I could always run it through an equalizer while mastering the audio to bump of the lower frequencies. This past year, I designed and built a new entertainment meant specifically to hold all of my LPs and 45s, the vast majority of which are from the 1980s, and I decided to buy a new turntable to start listening to them again. Knowing that AT turntable was always a highly rated unit, I decided to go for it. Two things immediately jumped out at me when everything was done. The first is that this beast is HEAVY compared to the cheapy ION turntable. The ION weighed at most 9 pounds, which was fine for the roll-out shelf I had it on. But the AT turntable came in at a whopping (relatively speaking) 23 pounds! The unit was definitely designed to stay seated and minimize any external vibrations. I ended up replacing the rolling shelf supports in my A/V rack with heavy-duty supports, just to be safe. The second (and most important for me) is that the bass was much, much stronger. Yes, the overall audio quality was superior, but after playing one track from "Rubber Soul" I said to my wife, "I actually hear bass from my records now!" I know that records are coming back (although I'm not naive enough to think that they'll be anywhere near as popular as they were before), but at least now I have a turntable that makes vinyl worth listening to again.