Crosley C62 Review: An authentic bargain?

Yes, there are plenty of amenities and features here for your money. The real question is whether or not you will actually be able to enjoy listening to all of this…

Introduction

Crosley has made a name for itself when it comes to very affordable turntables, radios and cassette players. Few companies enjoy the brand awareness of Crosley and can compete in terms of product/price ratio.

So I’m more than a little curious to find this Bluetooth turntable system, complete with speakers, that costs less than one of Trusted Reviews’ favorite affordable standalone record players. Is this a genuine deal? Or is it too good to be true?

The Crosley C62 Bluetooth turntable system is on sale, and in the UK you shouldn’t expect to pay more than £249 for the large cardboard box it comes in. In Crosley’s native America, it sells for around $279, while in Australia, it’ll set you back around AU$349.

There are a few brands that will sell you a system as comprehensive as this for an equally modest outlay, but Crosley is by far the most prominent of the lot. So it seems like the perfect place to start our ‘is spending a relatively modest sum on a full multi-function system a false economy or not?

Design

• Belt driven turntable
• Spring-loaded speaker cable terminals
• Choice of three finishes

That’s not a lot of money to spend on a turntable and a pair of speakers – so it follows that there hasn’t been much design here.

The review sample’s speakers and bridge are wrapped in walnut laminate, but you can choose black or gray if you prefer. The speakers are a compact two-way design (250 x 159 x 159mm, HxWxD), with a soft dome tweeter above a treated paper mid/bass driver behind their removable fabric grilles.

On the back there’s a small bass-reflex port above a pair of spring-loaded speaker cable terminals, and on the bottom of the cabinet some small silicone feet to make positioning on a shelf as simple as possible.

The turntable, on the other hand, is a belt-driven design and features a steel platter with a felt non-slip mat. The straight aluminum tonearm comes with a pre-fitted Audio Technica moving magnet cartridge and has built-in anti-skate control – the setup, as it is, is to slide the belt over the pulley of the motor and attach the counterweight to the tonearm.

On top of the plinth you’ll find two rotating control dials – one toggles between 33.3 and 45 rpm and initiates Bluetooth pairing, while the other is a volume control. At the bottom are anti-vibration rubber feet, while the rear is fully connected. This means spring clips for the speaker cable, a switch for the built-in phono stage (in case you want to use the C62’s RCA outputs to connect the turntable to an external amp or powered speakers) and an on/off switch.

The build quality is nothing special, but again, there’s really nothing wrong with that. Yes, all the corners of all the speakers and the turntable are sharp, but everything is screwed, glued or assembled well, and the walnut laminate casing is applied with confidence. Just because you’re shopping at the entry level doesn’t mean you should expect sub-par build quality – and Crosley isn’t trying to get you there.

Features

• Bluetooth 5.0 with SBC and AAC codec compatibility
• Plexiglass dust cover
• RCA outputs at line or phono level

Not all all-in-one systems are all contained in a single unit, but the Crosley C62 certainly has more going for it than might seem obvious at first glance.

These little speakers are a passive, two-way design – so they are, admittedly, as they seem. But the turntable element incorporates amplification – Crosley doesn’t say what type or power, but I’ll put the house on it being a) Class D, and b) modest. It also has a built-in phono stage, to make connecting to an external amplification source as easy as possible.

The record player is also where the C62 keeps its wireless streaming hardware. It is equipped with Bluetooth 5.0, and compatibility with SBC and AAC codecs – barely state-of-the-art, but more than enough for the majority of users most of the time. The C62 automatically enters pairing mode when the Bluetooth input is selected – it’s a stop on the same dial that controls platter rotation speed.

All of this is kept spotless by a well-finished clear plexiglass dust cover. It sits solidly on its hinges to the point that it’s extremely difficult to get going again.

Sound quality

• The sound lacks detail, dynamics and musicality
• Rotational stability not perfect
• Bluetooth can cut the beginning of files

Crosley provides everything you need in terms of cables, and setup is dead simple. Simply place the belt on the platter and pulley, adjust the counterweight and anti-skate control, and remove the cartridge cover – and you’re done.

The results, however, are not all a) they could be, and b) you could hope for. With a 180g reissue of the immortal There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Sly & The Family Stone on the turntable, the Crosley is a particularly boned distant listen. There is no animation in the sound it delivers, no dynamism or presence… and so therefore there is no particular engagement, let alone pleasure, to be extracted from its sound. . The bass is ill-defined and not particularly, well, bass-y – and the midrange, where the (usually) full-character voice is, has no projection whatsoever. The way the C62 presents vocals is so down-to-earth it’s almost soporific.

At the top of the frequency range, meanwhile, the Crosley manages the by no means easy feat of sounding blunt and shrill at the same time. One or the other, do you think? And yet, the C62’s treble response is dull and muted while still managing to sound edgy and thin. Strangely, it’s almost admirable.

This vinyl performance isn’t helped by the inaccurate and rather diaphanous nature of the soundstage it creates. And that’s made even less enjoyable by the fact that the platter itself spins with less speed-related stability than is absolutely ideal.

Switch to the Bluetooth input, of course, and the fact that the turntable can’t maintain a steady 33.3 rpm isn’t a problem. The sonic characteristics already described are all still evident, however – and they’re joined by the C62’s tendency to cut off the first split second of the digital file it’s playing. Missing the first milliseconds of your favorite song makes the listening experience more unsettling than it should be.

Latest offers

Sustainability

Trusted Reviews’ holds the fact that global warming is not a myth as a core value and will continuously strive to help protect our planet from harm in its business practices.

As part of this mission, each time we review a product, we send the company a series of questions to help us assess and make transparent the device’s impact on the environment.

We have not currently received answers to questions about this product, but we will update this page as soon as we do. You can see a detailed breakdown of the questions we ask and why in our sustainability information page.