Direct Drive

If you have a good digital front end you may be disappointed with analog at your budget.  I have no experience with the Technics table you mentioned, but I would avoid anything with a "built in" phono stage.

Consider purchasing used.  You might be surprised at how good a $500 vintage direct drive can sound.  You can still find SL 1200 MK2 tables that weren't used by DJs and there are a lot of accessories available that can improve sound quality.  I have one and enjoy it a lot.  It's not the same as my Sota Sapphire, but it was about 1/10 of the cost.

I have a JVC QL-Y66F from the 80s that's really nice.  It does have a couple of week spots - the base is hollow and flimsy and it will howl at high volumes.  The feet are junk.  I put a few pounds of plasticlay inside the base and replaced the feet with MNPCTECH feet and now it sings and no feedback issues at high volumes.  I'm using a Denon DL-301 MK 2 cartridge on it and currently running it with my Manley Chinook.  You could pick up a table like this for around $500, around $500 for the cartridge, and get a Parks Puffin phono stage for less than $500 and have a nice setup.  The feet and plasticlay were another $150 I think.  Not much more than you're planning to spend, but a much better setup. 

We all have different budgets and ideas of what's "good enough", and we don't know what your digital setup looks like, so it's hard to say how far you would need to go to get enjoyment comparable to your digital front end, but for a lot of us, the "sweet spot" budget wise usually starts around $5K and then goes up from there.

I'm totally unimpressed with 2M red. It sounds muffled. It seemed to me that if I use it on my rig, I won't be able to appreciate my record collection.

I've owned Rega and VPI belt drives, much prefer my Technics SP10MKII with custom plinth. Much more slam, impact, pace than the belt drives.

Perhaps my situation unique in that I mostly concentrated on digital side for years,  resulting in superior digital sound quality vs my analog setups. Part of what spurred me to migrate from belt to direct drive was intention to replicate certain aspects of digital sound quality to the analog side, the SP provided exactly what I was seeking.

I love my Direct Drive JVC TT81. I encourage DD, certainly Technics knows how to do it superbly.

Auto-Lift is a TERRIFIC feature!

Built-In Phono EQ to Line Level (can be turned off to use an existing or future external phono stage) is easy, and may sound darn good. I actually preferred my AT120’s built-in to my McIntosh C28’s phono. Later I turned it off and used my McIntosh mx110z’s phono stage which sounds wonderful.

Included pre-aligned Cartridge is an excellent feature for a beginner. I would encourage acquiring a few tools and skills to mount and align cartridges, so other cartridges could be pre-mounted on headshells, waiting to play: MC; MM; Mono ....

The arm base looks like it adjusts height easily, important if cartridge heights vary.

So what was boring about the Clearaudio Concept Turntable and what cartridge, tonearm and phono stage did you have paired up with it?