The replacement GPO PR50 turned up today, and while it's in a better state then the defective one (the headphone socket does at least work on this one) with the exception of the damage to the cover near the back of the tone arm (about the same as was on the defective unit) it wasn't all good as I did my little hack to lower the tracking force (two pennies jammed on either side of the tone arm near what they laughingly refer to as a counterweight with a 5p added to get the tracking force under 3.5g) and sadness part 1 got about a minute in and started repeating the same part over and over (removing the 5p part of my weight adjustment hack fixed that) and opposites attract did the same near the end with no changes in the added weight making and difference and moving the counterweight would have put the tracking force massively over spec for the stylus and would have taken the tracking force over the 6g max tracking force set down decades ago.
The good news is that Tetris played through without the skipping I experienced on my cheaper turntable and the other record also played skip free and didn't exhibit the pops I heard on the cheaper turntable, but the motor seemed to have issues on another record although it might have been down to the slipmat but a stop and start of the turntable along with some turning of the pitch control knob sorted that (might have been a minor issue since this unit fires up the turntable motor after I turned it on and when this happened, I didn't stop it like I did the first time).
Since this does have a replaceable cartridge, I might just replace it (that does depend on if the cartridge is a genuine audio technica part since I'm not sure that it is) for something better with a suitable stylus with some modding to add a permanent solution to adjust the tracking force without having to jam coins somewhere to do that (as long as something like auto set anti skate doesn't mess things up), but I'm actually going to go and do what I was going to do and get the suitcase style turntable that is a lot better then all the others (as long as I don't get a dud unit).