A Rega P5 with RB700 tonearm just went for £400. Is that a good price?
I don't know, I'm not very familiar with the prices of the different Rega decks. But the P5 is only one above the P3 range, there is the P7 and P9 above it. If I were you I'd be looking at decks that trade punches in the P9 range.
The thought I had was that it should be fairly easy to determine which TTs have readily available parts
Well it is I guess it is, it just takes time. You have to google, ask on forums, ask dealers, find specialist suppliers in some instances but you can do it. It's surprising how much is available even for quite old decks but you do have to do your homework first, before you buy anything. Which is fine, because that's what you're doing! ;0)
I probably wouldn't have mentioned them but anything made by Rega is fine. Even the top decks are relatively simple and the arms are among the toughest ever made. Anything made by Rega will sound better than the Début but if you want top performance you're looking at the P9. Even then it's questionable whether the design philosophies that make the budget decks so successful translate up to the top level but it's certainly not a bad deck.
Call be boring but I still can't see past the Linn LP12. There are plenty of decks that can beat it in certain areas, sometimes quite dramatically, but overall it's still a lovely, very well balanced record player to own. Quality wise it kills the Début, drags it out into the garden and buries it, then digs it up and kills it again!
But that's not why the LP12 is such a good bet. There are other good turntables out there but what makes the difference is that Linn were first and foremost an engineering company, and turntables are engineering products. They were not an electronics company, which is why all of the first amplifiers they made packed in and Naim were, which is why their amplifiers are brilliant but they still can't build a decent speaker, but meanwhile, back at the ranch...
The LP12 has been in production for forty years and you can still upgrade and get parts for every deck ever made. The constancy of build quality is staggering, I took an old top plate and fitted it into plinth twenty-years younger and it was a perfect fit. Even the screw holes lined up exactly!
That might not seem much of a big deal until you look at the alternatives. Two of the Linns big rivals were the Pink Triangle and Roxsan Xerxes. The inside of a Pink can only be described as shoddy, with plastic suspension adjusters that stripped held up by blocks of wood that can just fall off. It also has a sapphire bearing that was easy to break. The Roxan had a top plate made of MDF which they only laminated on one side, so it warped. Eventually so badly that the platter rubbed on the top of the deck.
The LP12 is not perfect but if you want a deck that you can get parts for easily and upgrade over time to a very high level it's a great choice.