BSR McDonald 500A
A British-built automatic that sold for $59.50 and turned up inside some of the era's most popular stereo compacts.
Overview
The 500A was the middle child of BSR's McDonald "trio" of automatic turntables. Its $59.50 suggested retail was quoted in period advertising as the price "less base and cartridge," and it sat between the cheaper 400 and the pricier 600. The money bought a low-mass tubular aluminum tonearm, counterbalanced both horizontally and vertically, with a resiliently mounted coarse-and-fine vernier adjustable counterweight. That's real engineering for a changer in this bracket. The arm could be dialed in for a wide range of cartridges instead of being locked to whatever the factory shipped.
The anti-skate is what separates the 500A from the bottom of the line. BSR fitted a continuously adjustable dynamic anti-skate control. The company's own literature describes it as correcting compensation across all groove diameters, to neutralize the inward force and the distortion from unequal sidewall pressure on the stylus. The same documents list a micrometer-style stylus pressure adjustment in 1/3 gram steps from 0 to 6 grams. That covers everything from a delicate high-compliance cartridge to a heavy conical one. A resilient spring suspension, paired with the low-mass arm, was pitched as minimizing susceptibility to external shock, the footfall-and-floorboard problem of any turntable sitting on a wooden shelf.
The platter is a full-size, deep-drawn unit. The mat has a wide brushed aluminum ring, and the whole deck is styled in satin black and brushed aluminum.
The 500A is known less for standalone sales than for where it ended up. Heathkit picked it as the turntable for the AD-27 FM Stereo Compact. Their catalog copy calls it an "excellent British-crafted" automatic and lists its cueing and pause control, variable anti-skate device, adjustable stylus pressure, and low-mass tubular aluminum arm among the features "normally found only in very expensive units." The same deck appeared in the Heathkit AD-19 "Component Credenza," where the copy notes it plays up to six records and shipped with a Shure diamond stylus magnetic cartridge. Buyers who wanted the turntable on its own could get it factory pre-assembled and tested with a Shure M-44-7 cartridge as a package.
Audio (October 1967, p.41) ran the BSR McDonald trio advertisement with the 500A priced at $59.50, positioning it beneath the 600 and above the $49.50 400, and the same "Total Turntable" pitch — pre-assembled, cartridge and all — appeared across HiFi-Stereo and Audio through the 1967–68 buying season. The pitch was consistent: BSR, described in its own ads as the world's largest maker of automatic turntables, was selling convenience and a feature set borrowed from far more expensive decks.
The 500A shows its age in the same places every BSR of the era does. The changer mechanism depends on hardened grease and a clean idler. After decades of sitting unused, these decks stiffen up and the automatic cycle stalls mid-change. None of this is exotic - parts decks are plentiful and the mechanism is well documented - but a buyer should expect to do the work rather than assume a fifty-year-old automatic will just run.
Values reflect that. On its own terms, the 500A is a honest, over-engineered-for-the-money automatic that did its job inside a lot of living rooms — and did it without asking much.
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