USB Turntable

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Lars
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USB Turntable

#1 Post by Lars » Tue Apr 22, 2008 11:33 am

On a whim I picked up a USB turntable last weekend and was pleased with the final product. A friend of mine sent me a box of CDs and a few vinyl albums. Included was a 3 record set of Frank Teschemacher from the Time-Life Giants of Jazz series. Pretty good clarinetist who worked with Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier and Wingy Manone as well as others. With a minimum of tinkering I turned it ito a 3 CD set for him. Now I'm gonna have to start looking for more old vinyl I guess.
Anybody else here converting vinyl to digital?
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kbuxton
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#2 Post by kbuxton » Tue Apr 22, 2008 4:23 pm

Which one did you get? My non-USB turntable died and I'd never gotten around to converting my LPs so need to replace it with something.

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Lars
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#3 Post by Lars » Tue Apr 22, 2008 4:44 pm

Hi K,
I got the ion usb turntable from Best Buy (of all places) and I think it did a good job on the vinyl that I converted. I would be interested in opinions on this one and others. The only down side that I forsee with the ion is that it only does 33 1/3 and 45's not 78rpm
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Lawrence
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#4 Post by Lawrence » Tue Apr 22, 2008 5:22 pm

I looked into them, but rejected getting one. They are convenient and nifty and seemed like EXACTLY what I wanted/needed, but if I am going to go to all that work of digitizing my LP collection, I want the results to be as close to perfect as possible.

Both audiophile and computer-geek tests have reported universally that the all-in-one LP-to-CD recorders work the worst, that the Ion-type USB turntables work o.k., and that the best results come from plugging a decent-quality turntable directly into your computer via a sound card (like the Imic), where the analog-digital audio conversion process is much more controllable through your software than through the hardware inside the Ion turntable.

The main problem with the Ion is that, at that price-point, you simply can't get a good turntable, so the source sound off the LP is pretty mediocre. Most people raised on CDs don't know (or people who once owned turntables have forgotten) that a cheap turntable is NOT like cheap CD player: where there is not much difference in sound quality between a cheap CD player and a top-of-the-line CD player, and the difference is only in the interface and the bells and whistles. There is a HUGE difference in sound quality between a cheap and an expensive turntable.

Specifically, the needle the Ions use is cheap, the arm is cheap, the angle the arm hits the turntable is not ideal, the weight and balance of the tone arm is not good, the mechanisms where the tone arm hits the turntable are not the best, the motor to spin the table creates excess motor-noise, and the DAC (analog-to-digital converter) inside the turntable is just average. There are so many variables that go into making a good turntable, which is why the CD player ultimately replaced them so completely.

Based on that, I decided that when I plunge into digitizing my LP collection, I will do it with a decent turntable and a sound card hooked into my computer.

Then again, the downside is that I researched it a year or so ago, and my records still sit idle on two five-foot shelves in my closet while I procrastinate it until I get that perfect setup.
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Surreal
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#5 Post by Surreal » Tue Apr 22, 2008 8:14 pm

I volunteer at my campus radio station, so I have access to the studio and all the proper recording and computer gear. My faculty of music also has a nice collection on LP. Now if only there were 40 hours in the day so I could actually find the time to use it all :?

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Lawrence
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#6 Post by Lawrence » Wed Apr 23, 2008 11:37 am

Surreal wrote:I volunteer at my campus radio station, so I have access to the studio and all the proper recording and computer gear. My faculty of music also has a nice collection on LP. Now if only there were 40 hours in the day so I could actually find the time to use it all :?
Yes, time is definitely the biggest impediment. Back to the days of tapes where you had to record (*gasp*) in real time. :D

But at least with a computer, you can just leave it record one side at a time, edit out the silence at the end when you return, and then splice the songs apart rather quickly. You don't need to sit with it once you get things going.
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#7 Post by Surreal » Wed Apr 23, 2008 12:12 pm

I might make it a summer project...

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Eyeball
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#8 Post by Eyeball » Wed Apr 23, 2008 4:51 pm

I did a project such as this when I taped my collection of 78s onto cassette.

Took me 2 or 3 weeks, 8 hours a day, sitting in a partially below ground on a hillside in a room where the humidity was so high that the minor dust on the records from their paper jackets was clumping up on the stylus as I recorded.

I only taped what I did not have on LP.

I gotta lotta cassettes...now to dub them onto CD or whatever is around the corner.
Will big bands ever come back?

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