This All-in-One Record Player Is Great at Preserving Memories
If you’re looking to get into, or back into, enjoying vinyl but don’t want to invest in an expensive or complicated system, the Angels Horn H019 is a perfect option.
I’d grown up collecting vinyl too. But I’d given away my last turntable more than 10 years ago and sold or traded most of my record collection; these days my listening is primarily on streaming services played through Sonos or Bluetooth speakers. As convenience collided with nostalgia, something had to give.
Due to space issues and a little laziness, I didn’t want to assemble another music system just to play my dad’s vinyl. So, based on my colleague Brent Butterworth’s recommendation, I bought the Angels Horn H019, which combines a record player and a speaker system in one cabinet.
It instantly secured a treasured connection to my father that could’ve been lost.
As Brent describes in Wirecutter’s guide to turntables and record players, the Angels Horn H019 sounds fuller and more balanced than most of the all-in-one record players he tested. The use of separate woofers and tweeters in the speaker design helps it reproduce sound more accurately than many cheap competitors. It isn’t an audiophile’s dream gear, but it is well built, with a floating aluminum platter and an overall sturdy feel.
The Angels Horn H019 uses a two-speed (33 rpm and 45 rpm) belt-drive system to spin the metal platter. It comes with the widely used Audio-Technica AT-3600L phono cartridge, which can produce a very balanced sound, and it has an adjustable tonearm so you can set the correct tracking force on the stylus to help prevent skipping and bouncing.
The walnut-colored wood veneer has a classic look that I like, but you can also get the H019 in black if you’re feeling goth.
Setup requires little more than attaching the belt and adjusting the tonearm’s weight. It took me just a few minutes. But if that seems complicated, plenty of YouTube videos are available to guide you through the process.
The player can even connect to a smartphone via Bluetooth if you want to stream tunes to the H019’s built-in speakers. In the year I’ve owned this record player, I’ve done that only twice. (Sadly, the system has just a Bluetooth receiver, not a transmitter, so you can’t stream your records to Bluetooth headphones or speakers.)
The first record I played was my father’s 1959 Peter Gunn soundtrack. I grew up hearing that through an old Bradford stereo system, and it has always been a kind of theme music running though the background in my head. While the Angels Horn player didn’t do much in the bass department, it still re-created the “smoky rooms and whiskey glass” mood of that classic LP.
Around Christmastime, I can easily open the Spotify app on my phone and browse through the gazillion holiday playlists available. But it’s more fun to pull out the same Bing Crosby and Eydie Gormé albums on vinyl that followed my family through three states over the decades.
The record player isn’t as convenient as the Sonos multiroom audio system feeding my house, but I really enjoy cranking up the H019 in the living room while I’m making dinner in the kitchen. The volume is more than sufficient for my home; I never turn the knob up more than 60%.
In addition to my father’s stack of records, I also cleaned up the few remaining albums of mine that had survived two basement floods and the resultant mildew. Even though the album cover is mostly destroyed, my copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall still sounds appropriately disturbing through the Angels Horn player. It brings back a swirl of memories from my youth.
And that’s the thing: It’s not really the record player that’s precious to me. It’s the picture in my head when I’m spinning the 1953 Ellington Uptown LP: I imagine my father as a teenager, sitting in the small house on Blackberry Alley, holding a shiny record sleeve and hearing those saxophones and trombones for the first time.
It’s more than just music that lives in the grooves of that vinyl.
This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell and Ben Frumin.
