Ion TTUSB Turntable with USB Record

• USB 1.1 turntable that makes it a snap to convert vinyl collection to CD or MP3 formats
• Includes Audacity PC/Mac recording software and trial version of Bias Soundsoap 2
• Adjustable anti-skating control for increased stereo balancing
• Support for high-speed vinyl recording; works with both 33-1/3 and 45 rpm speeds
• Line-level outputs for easy stereo connection; 1/8-inch line-level input; weighs 7.7 pounds

This item is just too good to pass up. I have a couple hundred vinyl albums that I still listen to occassionally. I have made several disappointing attempts to transfer vinyls to CD in the past, but it always turned out to be too much work to get too poor of a transfer. I kept hoping to find a better way to preserve my collection, and this is it.

SETTING UP THE TURNTABLE: The turntable is so very simple to set up, and the weight and materials are so different from those high end turntables of years past, that you might think you just wasted your money... don't worry, the best is yet to come. It took me all of 15 minutes to set up the turntable and plug it into my computer. Due to a couple of reviews that I read I took 3 precautions while setting up the turntable: 1) I used some of the foam wrapping material from the box and wrapped the RCA plugs to eliminate any extraneous noise that might be introduced into the system, 2) I put small felt pads under the legs of the table that the turntable will sit on, and 3) I used a stylus pressure gauge to get exactly 4 grams of weight (with the plastic cover still on the stylus which should give me approx 3.75 4 grams with the plastic cover off).

SETTING UP THE USB PART: Again it is totally a no-brainer. Just follow the meager instructions that are included with the turntable they are spot-on. When I plugged in the USB cable (I set it up on 2 different machines, a Dell and a home-made running XP Home Edition and XP Professional respectively). On both machines Windows ran me through several set-up wizards that installed the following drivers (it's all automatic, just click when it tells you to): USB Compliant Device, USB Audio Device, USB Human Interface Device, and HID Compliant Device. That's it... maybe 5 minutes of watching the computer do it's part.

SETTING UP THE SOFTWARE: I was pretty sceptical from the reviews I had read. Again, follow the meager software instuctions again they are spot-on. It probably took all of 15 minutes to get everything done.

RECORDING A VINYL ALBUM: Expect to spend about an hour per album (most albums take about 40 minutes just to play through). The process is simple: 1) copy the album to your harddrive, 2) Normalize the file, 3) remove extraneous noise, 4) Split the file into seperate tracks, and 5) write the WAV files to a CD (I used Nero for that part).

FINAL TRANSFER COPY: You'll want to spend a little time learning to use the software (maybe an hour of two and you will have it all down pat). For my first album I used one that was far from pristine. I wanted to see what the software is capable of. I could not be more pleased with the result. Using the software I was able to remove most of the extraeous noise. There is still a VERY slight amount of noise that you would normally expect, even from the most pristine vinyl album, and I like it that way.

BOTTOM LINE: This is an amazing purchase for the price. Everything works, and works better than I ever expected. A dustcover would have been nice, but I'll just make one, no big deal. All of the albums that I have transered so far sound incredible, pretty close to pristine quality, and if you really listen you will know the music is from the original vinyls... what could be better.

EDIT: After transferring about 20 vinyl albums a quick update should be useful...

1) for removing clicks, pops, and static I have settled into this process after copying the album to the harddrive don't "Normalize", instead just "select -> all" from the edit menu; then select "click removal" from the effects menu and move the top slider to the left about 1/2 of it's default center setting then click "remove clicks"; now click "Noise Removal" from the effects menu, select an area between tracks to set the "Get Profile Noise"; then "select -> all" from the edit menu and bring the noise removal window back up; move the slider to the left (about 1/2 way from the default center setting) and click "Remove Noise"; then bring the noise removal window back up again and repeat the noise removal a second time but move the slider a couple of clicks further towards "Less" this time; now just manually remove any remaining noise or clicks (there will be very little left). Your files should now be just right and ready to seperate and copy to CD. Any other method I used seemed to remove too much from the file and resulted in a clean but VERY SLIGHTLY muffled sound (it could just be me though because we are talking about very small degrees of difference here).

2) On my Dell computer there seems to be some kind of conflict with the USB turntable (I don't have the problem with my home made machine). The problem happens when I turn the computer on with the turntable USB cable already plugged into the computer... the computer will hang up during it's initial booting (before it starts loading windows). The solution is pretty simple, just unplug the USB cable before booting the computer and plug it back in after the computer boots up fully, but it kind of bugs me.

EDIT #2: A couple of posts refer to a "Dreaded Silence" problem. After transferring about 50 albums I had it happen to me also. The problem is that the software (??? not certain) seems to be adjusting the computer's system volume to almost mute. Just go into "Control Panel" -> "Adjust speaker Volume" -> "Advanced" and move the "Wave" volume slider back up to a higher value. Hope that helps.

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Easy to set up. I'm a non-techno yutz, and this was simple for me to install and configure.

Easy to use. I was recording LPs to WAV files in the first hour. Within two hours, I was able to break a side up into individual tracks and cuts and save them separately.

Perfect Fidelity! The quality of the reproduction is fantastic! This is the greatest thing in the world! No need for pre-amp or amp, just LP to PC.

Noise? Yes, of course; this also converts your scratches and pops with digital exactness. But even so, you're well ahead of the game: at least this way you'll never have to worry about putting *new* scratches on your favorite music!

This is one of the best investments I have ever made; I'm overjoyed with this technology!

Read Best Reviews of Ion TTUSB Turntable with USB Record Here

Don't be scared off from this turntable by the reviews here that say it barely works with a Mac, because I got it to work with my Mac right out of the box. The thing to keep in mind is that people aren't really complaining about the turntable itself; they're complaining about the software included with it--which is actually shareware! Having read the complaints here, I decided just to use different software with it, and it works fine. You can use whatever Mac audio software to record that you prefer--I tried CD Spin Doctor, which comes with the famous Toast CD burning program, and Sound Studio, which is shareware you can find at any number of Mac shareware sites on the web (it actually came installed on my mac, so you may already have it). I preferred Sound Studio because CD Spin Doctor is a little buggy. Once you choose what software you want to use with the turntable, and you plug the USB wire into your Mac, simply go into your system preferences under the Apple logo menu, and choose the Sound preference; once you're in that, change Sound Input to the turntable and click "OK." You're ready to use the software--none of this Apple MIDI nonsense. It's really THAT Simple!

So how's the turntable for transferring vinyl to your computer? It's pretty good--it got much better sound than I got previously with an iMic adaptor hooked up to my home stereo. I will say, it's a little more treble-ly than I'd like, but it's very slight, and you likely can adjust your music file to have more bass in whatever software you use to record. Or, you can just pump up the bass in iTunes when you play it back. Either way, not that big a problem.

Drawbacks--it doesn't come with a dust cover. For shame. Also, no "78" mode; if you do choose to use the Audacity software that comes with it, that allows you to change the speed of a song to 78, so you'd record in 33 or 45, and then change the file after the fact to 78. Yikes, too much bother, but then again, when was the last time most of us played a 78 anyway? Finally, I wish there was some automation for dropping the tone arm down and picking it up at the end, but this isn't going to go into my home stereo set up anyway (although it could since it also has RCA wires as well as the USB). I'm just using it to transfer old b-sides and bands whose albums will never get rereleased, and in that regard, it's perfect for the job.

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On the one hand, the Ion works quite well. It's easy to set up, produces surprisingly good quality sound, and turns the whole process of digitizing vinyl into a two-device, three step process... rather than the four device, multi-step process I'd been using.

On the other hand, the software included with the turntable is a bad joke, at least for Mac users. There's no installation software Ion includes the source code for Audacity and expects you to compile it yourself. (You'd be much better off downloading it compiled from Sourceforge.) There's a complex process involving Audio MIDI setup, including a workaround for a nasty bug regarding sound quality setup. Once you get it working, it's quite impressive, but it's very far from user friendly. Let's hope this gets better in future releases of the product, because the hardware is nicely designed and the results are quite impressive.

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Updated January 16, 2008.

Ion's software support for this product and Macintosh has gotten much, much better since I wrote this review, 18 months ago. The current software doesn't require any fiddling with the MIDI settings on Mac, as the turntable now mounts in your Sound control panel as an audio input. And they've done a nice job of filtering the audio that comes through this input so that you can get excellent results saving directly from Audacity, without equalizing or filtering, as was pretty much necessary in the original release. I would modify my three star rating to four stars the turntable still needs a speed control and a dust cover, but the software's much better.

I bought this for $139 (not including taxes or shipping) through Amazon and have been very happy with it. It was easy to set up, the directions were clearly written, and it does a good job of converting my old LPs to digital form, in my case, to MP3s.

The Audacity software is intuitive and easy to use, though you do have to go onto the Internet and download a particular file (a snap to do). On some albums, the MP3s created sound significantly better than the album itself -the static and pops are gone, for example. But on others, getting rid of all of the static results in a somewhat distorted digial version. It's kind of a balancing act and you have to make adjustments using the software (easy) to decide what the optimal level of noise removal is. But even with no noise removal, the skips are abbreviated, and I'd say that almost all of my MP3s (I've converted only about 12 albums so far) sound at least a little better than the LP.

This is a great product!