One of the most common issues I see with people just getting into vinyl for the first time, is that they “buy in” at the wrong level.
It’s very easy to spend a lot of money on a turntable only to find out that what vinyl lovers consider to be, perhaps, “the ceremony of playing a record” is, for them, closer to a “fiddly rigmarole”. It’s also easy to buy in too-low, especially with used tables that weren’t any good to begin with, and find the experience is great but the sound is seriously lacking - to the point it can turn them off the whole deal.
If I look at my local craigslist, there’s a couple of decent, older, very basic looking, but good quality tables. If they’ve been properly maintained, they’d be excellent starting points. And then there’s scores of tables that are just absolutely awful and, even new, aren’t going to give a performance representative of decent, budget, setup.
Despite advice to the contrary, I’ve had too many friends buy a random used deck from a local seller and had it put them off vinyl permanently. And that’s even when they’ve already experienced a properly setup, decent, table in someone else’s system.
Buying used is great if you can find the right table … but for most I think buying a modest NEW table, that comes out of the box properly setup, is a better way to find out if you’re going to like vinyl overall and doesn’t have to cost any more than what a lot of these plastic-fantastic or dug-out-of-the-attic-and-hasn’t-been-run-for-20-years offerings tend to be asking for.
The U-Turn Orbit is, as other’s have said, a decent starting place. I personally prefer the Pro-Ject Debut Carbon DC for that role (better arm, much better cartridge), but you can get the most basic Orbit for under $200, which is half the asking price of the Pro-Ject.
I used to recommend the entry-level Rega tables to newcomers, but at this point I would consider the latest version of the Rega Planar 3 to be the lowest-level table they sell that offers reasonable value. It’s not that the RP1 and RP2 are bad, just I feel the value proposition is out of whack. The Planar 3 also offers a more upgradeable platform.
Well cared for used-copies of these tables are also excellent buys.