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debg's fault.
Jul. 13th, 2007 09:52 pmThough I suppose I asked for it when I left this comment in her journal.
But I've gone out and bought one of those USB turntables - the ION TTTUSB - From Best Buy.
I got it home, and hooked it up to my laptop. It sounded terrible. So I hooked it up to my desktop, which was purpose-built for music production and it sounds good. I suspect that at 500MHz my laptop may be a bit underpowered for it.
So the product.
This is not a piece of audiophile equipment, nor is it a studio or DJ quality turntable, but rather a lightweight simulacrum of the latter. It's plastic platter is belt driven, and there is no provision for speed adjustment, and its non-branded magnetic cartridge tracks at a ponderous 3.5g VTF.
That all said, this is a purpose-built solution to a very particular problem - the transferring of Vinyl to Digital, mostly MP3 format. Given this purpose, it is an elegant solution - it connects via USB to a computer and will connect to a stereo at either standard phono levels, or line level by means of a built in pre-amp. The USB interface to the PC relieves one of a lot of things that can otherwise make such a transfer difficult. The piece de resistance is the 1/8" stereo input jack allowing you to patch in a cassette player to its USB I/F. The sound quality is quite decent, and certainly up to the task of MP3'ing a vinyl collection. The DJ-styled start/stop buttons are very well suited to ripping individual tracks, though a heavier platter would make cueing easier. In keeping with the DJ style, there is no tone-arm return. This makes unattended copying something one needs to keep in the back of one's mind.
The software bundled is the GPL'd Audacity wave editor, comparable to Steinberg's WaveLab Lite, and a product that I was already using. It works as well as any wave editor. I have not pushed it terribly hard. MP3 export requires that you download the Lame_enc DLL. It is not bundled with it, because the LGPL license that the Lame encoder carries is thorny about commercial distribution. The Audacity/Lame interface has a problem with ID3 Tags - it will let you tag the first file you export in a session, but not the subsequent ones - it just retains the tag info you entered at first.
So final recommendations? Dang, it sounds like I've panned the thing, doesn't it? But really, at $150 from Best Buy, I must say it is a more than adequate solution. The built-in preamp alone is a tremendous time saver if you wish to use your Sound Card's A/D converter - no need for an amp, but the built in A/D converter/USB interface is at this device's heart. I fully expect to enjoy what it will let me achieve.
But I've gone out and bought one of those USB turntables - the ION TTTUSB - From Best Buy.
I got it home, and hooked it up to my laptop. It sounded terrible. So I hooked it up to my desktop, which was purpose-built for music production and it sounds good. I suspect that at 500MHz my laptop may be a bit underpowered for it.
So the product.
This is not a piece of audiophile equipment, nor is it a studio or DJ quality turntable, but rather a lightweight simulacrum of the latter. It's plastic platter is belt driven, and there is no provision for speed adjustment, and its non-branded magnetic cartridge tracks at a ponderous 3.5g VTF.
That all said, this is a purpose-built solution to a very particular problem - the transferring of Vinyl to Digital, mostly MP3 format. Given this purpose, it is an elegant solution - it connects via USB to a computer and will connect to a stereo at either standard phono levels, or line level by means of a built in pre-amp. The USB interface to the PC relieves one of a lot of things that can otherwise make such a transfer difficult. The piece de resistance is the 1/8" stereo input jack allowing you to patch in a cassette player to its USB I/F. The sound quality is quite decent, and certainly up to the task of MP3'ing a vinyl collection. The DJ-styled start/stop buttons are very well suited to ripping individual tracks, though a heavier platter would make cueing easier. In keeping with the DJ style, there is no tone-arm return. This makes unattended copying something one needs to keep in the back of one's mind.
The software bundled is the GPL'd Audacity wave editor, comparable to Steinberg's WaveLab Lite, and a product that I was already using. It works as well as any wave editor. I have not pushed it terribly hard. MP3 export requires that you download the Lame_enc DLL. It is not bundled with it, because the LGPL license that the Lame encoder carries is thorny about commercial distribution. The Audacity/Lame interface has a problem with ID3 Tags - it will let you tag the first file you export in a session, but not the subsequent ones - it just retains the tag info you entered at first.
So final recommendations? Dang, it sounds like I've panned the thing, doesn't it? But really, at $150 from Best Buy, I must say it is a more than adequate solution. The built-in preamp alone is a tremendous time saver if you wish to use your Sound Card's A/D converter - no need for an amp, but the built in A/D converter/USB interface is at this device's heart. I fully expect to enjoy what it will let me achieve.
