USB Turntables

Before those numpties trshed the olds website I asked about usb turntables….which ones were worth getting etc. I was planning to do something about it in the New Year but alas, the forum had gone so……same question really, to refresh my memory….which usb turntable?

Is it worth spending £150 or so or would a cheaper one do the same job?

do you currently have a turntable?

Yes, a Marantz….somewhere in the depths of the roof.

then you be needing one of these

using one right now to listen to mp3s but have also used as a USB phono stage

you are going to get 10xbetter than with an all in one solution. if you want good recordings then get one of them and a new stylus and roberts your mothers brother

blimey mrmw that’s expensive I just use a £20 pre-amp thing from Ricker sounds and plug the output straight to the line in on my sound card.

only advantage of the all-in-one solutions is that they will chop an album up and some also use gracenote to try and identify it for you – which is what takes the time for me chopping a big wav file up abnd naming the tracks.

Cool!

Thanks for your help.

line input not an option for me as i only have a laptop

you gets what you pay for though, that box does far more than just a phono stage but then that’s what i wanted.

it comes with software to chop up the recordings for you

I’m going to be routing it into a Mac if that makes any difference.

in general audio inputs that are mounted on or in a computer or laptop suffer from the fact that they are in very close proximity to lots of other electrical gubbins. a USB device isolates this and (in this case) isolates the power supply. remember the little earth cable you used to connect to your amplifier from your turntable, well you don’t see one of them on your PC

yes, all audio inputs [and outputs] on computers, whether they be pc’s or macs, are crap. what you really need is an external sound card, which even low-end cheap models are a vast improvement for any computer based audio.
i’ve had a look, all be it a quick look, at those usb turntables, and they seem to be a waste of money. use your old turntable and amp and invest in an external sound card [even a £30 creative labs one will do]

I use a Creative labs external sound card and plug the pre-amp into that. the audio software with it’s pretty good but they don’t offer windows vista support which is a pain 🙁

Will this not do the job too?
Tom

should be able to get a vista patch somewhere!!
as a rule i never use bundled software. i found the best is sony soundforge for input recording. dont use ‘vinyl clean-up’ software, as it will dampen the high-end audio frequencies. there’s nothing wrong with the odd pop and hiss on your recordings!!!