Lenco has just announced a new turntable that's the ultimate all-in-one record player: it includes all the bits for playing records, an amp and built-in speakers, a USB port for digitising your wax, and… well, it has LED lights in the platter, that can change in time with the music.
Priced at £150, the Lenco LS-50LED probably isn't going to trouble the more audiophile entries in our list of the best record players for sound quality, and while there's a part of me that can't shake the idea that it's a perversion of the form… it looks pretty fun! Especially for someone like a student, which is surely the target market.
You can choose between seven different colour options for the LED lights, or just let it change with the beat of the tracks, or even turn the lights off and pretend you were classy and serious the whole time.
The Lenco LS-50LED comes with a ceramic cartridge and two styluses in the box, and can be set to 33, 45 or 78 rpm speeds. The platter is belt driven, with an MDF cabinet, and an included dust cover (which reflects the LED lights quite nicely in Lento's shots).
If you grow out of the built-in speakers (as most surely will over time), there's an RCA output to connect to some external speakers – we've got a whole guide to the best turntable speakers, should you need it.
Well, it was just a matter of time before we got here, I suppose. The LED mafia was never going to be happy restricting itself to gamer gear and smart lighting. Several of the best Bluetooth speakers come with little built-in light shows now.
I think it's smart that Lenco integrated it into the platter here. It feels like the easy route would've been to just run the lights under the main body, but that would have been much less cool. Having it emerge from right under the records, and splash onto the controls, is much, much funkier.
The Lenco LS-50 range also comes in an LED-less form, for £130. You get all the same features, but whereas the LED model only comes in black, the regular LS-50 comes in a wood or light grey finish with a black platter, or a blue or pale pink finish with a light grey platter.
