The Origin Live Calypso serves as a vivid reminder of just how simple life has become since we adopted digital sources.

With a CD player, all one needs to do is take the thing out of the box, plug it in, slip a disc into a slot or drawer, push a button, and bingo - one has music. Life with the Calypso (or any other sophisticated record player for that matter) is a different ball game altogether.

Setting up the turntable isn't difficult or especially laborious, although we reckon it'll probably take you longer than the 15 minutes suggested by the instructions, particularly if this is your first venture into turntable set-up.

And, as we discovered, set-up is crucial if you want to hear this deck perform at its best. Get it right and you'll be as happy as a pig in muck; get it wrong and you'll need to take the porker out of the equation.

The Calypso is a skeletal design without the complexities of a sprung sub-chassis. That said, once you've assembled it, levelled it, topped up its bearing with oil, fitted its tonearm and dressed the arm cable through the P-clip, you'll have to fiddle with the positioning of its separate motor pod and attach the round-section drive belt, which can be tricky till you acquire the knack.

Once you've reached this stage, all that's left is to fine-tune the adjustment of your arm and cartridge and leave the deck running for a while to allow all its mechanical bits and pieces to bed in, and its circuitry to do whatever circuitry does during the early hours of its working life.

Origin Live thoughtfully supplies a specially modified phono lead so that you can burn in your tonearm's wiring by feeding the output of a CD player through it. You need to do exactly what the instructions tell you and route the tonearm cable to a line-level input before you attempt the process - we certainly won't be held responsible for the outcome if you don't.

You might also like to check the rotational speed of the deck once you've settled on the correct motor-pod position - the one that puts the drive belt at the correct tension.

Although judging what the correct tension is tends to be more a matter of experience than science, start by positioning the motor pulley 230mm away from the centre spindle on the platter. The Calypso's two motor speeds - 33rpm and 45rpm - can be fine-tuned if required by means of tiny screws reached through holes in the casing of the pod.

Our particular review sample came supplied with an Origin Live Encounter tonearm, though plenty of other options are available. Even to someone who has used a unipivot design for years, the Encounter might feel unnervingly delicate to begin with.

The dual-pivot bearing allows movement in the horizontal axle in all directions except downwards. Although this can feel disconcerting, it's a function of the design and you shouldn't worry about it.

The arm fits into a Rega-style mount and a large nut around the arm pillar clamps it in place on the arm-board section of the chassis.

The nut - despite looking like a suitable candidate for tightening with the largest wrench you can lay your hands on - should, according to Origin Live, only be nipped up finger-tight if you wish to avoid your music sounding 'dead'. We followed the company's advice, even though we found it disconcerting that the arm assembly could occasionally be persuaded to rotate while placing the arm-tube in its rest.