How to Connect a Turntable to a Receiver

The short answer: if your turntable has no built-in phono stage it goes to the socket marked PHONO and its ground wire goes to the GND screw beside it. If the turntable has a preamp of its own, switch it to LINE and use any ordinary input instead — AUX, CD, TAPE, anything except PHONO. Everything else on this page is the detail behind those two sentences, and the three faults that follow from getting them the wrong way round.

First, find out what each box has

Two questions, one for each end of the cable, and the answers decide everything.

Does the receiver have a PHONO input? Look along the back for a pair of RCA sockets labeled PHONO, almost always with a small screw post next to them marked GND or SIGNAL GND. The screw post is the giveaway — no other input on a receiver has one. Stereo receivers from the 1970s and 1980s nearly all have it; modern ones are split, and most AV receivers do not have it at all.

Does the turntable have a built-in phono preamp? Look for a PHONO/LINE switch on the deck’s rear panel, or the phrase “built-in preamp” in its manual. Most decks under about $400 have one — a Fluance RT81, an Audio-Technica AT-LP60X or AT-LP120XUSB all publish a switchable stage — and most decks above that deliberately do not, because the assumption is that you own something better. Our built-in preamp guide covers how to check a deck you already own.

The matching table

One rule runs through the whole table: exactly one phono stage in the chain. Not zero, which is quiet and thin, and not two, which is loud and distorted. If you remember nothing else from this page, remember that.

Wiring it, in order

1. Power everything off. Not for safety at these voltages, but because plugging a phono cable into a live, turned-up amplifier produces a bang that no tweeter enjoys.

2. RCA cables, red to red and white to white. Red is the right channel; white or black is the left. Push each plug fully home. A plug that is half seated is the most common cause of a channel that sounds thin, drops out when the cable is touched, or disappears entirely — our troubleshooting guide starts there for exactly that reason.

3. The ground wire. Most turntables have a thin extra wire ending in a spade connector or a bare tail. It goes on the GND screw of whichever box holds the phono stage: the receiver if you are using its PHONO input, the external preamp if you added one. Loosen the screw, slide the spade underneath, tighten it onto bare metal rather than paint. Some decks — Sony’s PS-LX3BT among them — have a captive output lead and no ground wire at all, which is a design choice rather than a fault.

4. Select the input and start quiet. A phono stage feeding a 100 W receiver is a great deal of gain, and the first record is not the moment to discover where the volume control sits. Bring it up gradually.

When the receiver has no PHONO socket

This is the most common version of the question, because modern receivers mostly dropped the input. You have two honest routes and one that does not work.

Route one: use the turntable’s own preamp. If the deck has a PHONO/LINE switch, set it to LINE and use any ordinary input. This costs nothing and is the right answer for most people starting out. The built-in stages on decks like the Fluance RT81 and the AT-LP120XUSB are switchable precisely so that you can bypass them later, which means you lose nothing by using one now.

Route two: add an external phono preamp. Turntable into the preamp, preamp into a line input, ground wire onto the preamp’s post. This is the only route if your deck has no stage of its own, and it is the better-sounding one if your deck’s built-in stage is basic. Our picks under $100 cover the useful end of that market, and gain and impedance explains the two numbers that decide whether a stage suits your cartridge.

What does not work: plugging a phono-level turntable into a line input and turning the volume up to compensate. The level problem is only half of it — without RIAA equalization the tonal balance is wrong too, which is why the result sounds thin and bass-light rather than merely quiet.

Choosing a receiver with the phono input already in it

If you are buying rather than connecting what you own, a receiver or integrated amplifier with a phono input removes a box, a mains socket and two cables from the system. Two published rows matter when you compare them: whether there is a PHONO input at all, and what speaker impedance the amplifier supports, because that decides which speakers you can put on it.

The Sony STR-DH190 publishes a phono input, 100 W per channel into 8 ohms, a 6 to 16 ohm speaker impedance range, four RCA inputs, Bluetooth, FM and a headphone jack — it is the budget default for this job. The Denon PMA-600NE publishes a phono input, 70 W per channel into 4 ohms, two optical and one coaxial digital input, and an analog mode that powers down the digital circuitry, which is a genuine feature on a signal that starts at a few thousandths of a volt. Our amplifier picks rank the field on that first row, and matching an amp to speakers covers the impedance arithmetic.

One alternative worth naming: if you have not bought speakers yet, you can skip the receiver entirely. A pair of powered speakers with a phono input inside — the Klipsch R-50PM is the clearest example, with a phono switch and a ground screw terminal on its rear panel — does the amplifier’s job and the phono stage’s job in two boxes rather than four. Our no-receiver guide lays out that route in full.

Three faults, and which one you have

Quiet, thin, no bass: no phono stage in the chain. Switch the deck to PHONO if it has a switch and you are in a PHONO input, switch it to LINE if you are in a line input, or add a preamp.

Loud, harsh, uncontrollable: two phono stages. Switch the deck’s own stage off, or move the cable to a line input.

A steady hum: usually the ground wire, and the test is to touch the tonearm — if the hum drops, the earth is not landed properly. If everything is earthed and it still hums, you may have a ground loop, and removing that wire can be the fix. Hum and grounding works through all three cases, including the one that is not electrical at all.

And if the sound is right but the record will not track properly, the problem is at the other end of the chain entirely: record skipping covers tracking force, anti-skate and the rest, and leveling is the free check most people skip.