[PLUG] USB Turntable

[Jeme A Brelin]

In reference to your earlier post, Dick, my understanding is that the USB 
turntables that were available were not USB2.0 and the new ones will be.

I'm kind of holding out for that.

The rest of this is a long explanation of my home audio needs.  I'll be 
shocked if anyone reads it, but I'm desperate to avoid writing a paper on 
group cohomology.

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Richard C. Steffens wrote:
> John Jason Jordan wrote:
>> I meant to ask before, wouldn't it be easier/cheaper just to get a 
>> plain ol' turntable, plug it into the computer input jacks, and use 
>> software to convert the input to something electronic? Or does such 
>> software not exist?

Of course, you can do that.  However, I'm looking to minimize hardware 
while still maintaining flexibility of format.  So I will be replacing my 
nice direct-drive Gemini turntable with something that can be used to rip 
audio digitally.  I believe that the AD converter in the turntable will be 
high quality and I won't have to worry about analog signal going through 
cables and minijack ports.

In the end, I'm hoping to just output to amplified speakers from general 
purpose computers while still maintaining my modest collection of vinyl 
(there are a handful of CDs and cassettes I'll keep for completism, but 
none of the cassettes contain anything I don't also have on CD, so access 
to the data is not important).

I would love to find a PC minidisc drive, but they've gone with the auk, 
methinks.  I guess the other option is to get a nice digital recorder to 
replace my portable minidisc recorder.  Fuck.

> I used to do this with a Dual 12-mumble-mumble, until it died. Having it 
> repaired is not cost effective -- I've done it once already, and expect 
> it would need doing again, periodically.

Yeah, when I finally got sick of the belts slipping on my old cruddy 
turntable, I set out to buy a new one.  I was kind of shocked to find that 
there's no such thing as an inexpensive turntable these days.  There are 
nice ones and outrageously nice ones.  Turns out the things are marketted 
only to DJs and audiophiles.  I went to a DJ shop and ended up spending a 
few hundred dollars about seven years ago.  The quality is quite good, but 
my needs are changing.

I'm trying to simplify my life (and prepare for the move to grad school 
living conditions) by divesting myself of material things.  I've come to 
find that I don't really use any of my VHS cassettes, DVDs, CDs, or 
cassettes anymore.  I play audio in five locations:  The living room, my 
bedroom, the TV room, the kitchen, and my bicycle garage.

In the living room, I have a complete stereo system with the one 
turntable, the CD, cassette, and minidisc decks, a radio tuner, and a 
Turtle Beach Audiotron which mounts shared filesystems on my house 
computer network and accesses audio found there for playback.  The only 
things that aren't just collecting dust are the audiotron and the 
turntable.

My bedroom has my personal computer conected to bookshelf stereo system 
that houses an MD deck, CD player, and radio tuner.  This particular 
bookshelf system does have a phono connection as well as digital 
input/output.  [Holy crap, I might be able to just use this as my 
interface point and ditch everything else and not by the USB turntable.  I 
didn't even think about that until doing this dumb inventory and actually 
checking the capabilities of all the equipment.  I think I just made 
myself very happy -- assuming I can get the digital audio to play nice 
with my sound card's i/o.]

The TV room is where I keep my modified XBox which mounts the shared 
network filesystems and plays the audio found there.

The garage and kitchen both have amplified speakers connected to iPod 
docks.  Since my iPod contains all of the audio on my personal computer's 
shared system, this gives us most of what's on the network (everything 
except the stuff on the neighbors' shared filesystems which are part of 
our local network) and also gives me good opportunity to charge my iPod 
without thinking about it.

So, yeah.  I just need some means of putting my vinyl, CDs, and MDs on the 
network or the iPod.  Direct playback from those storage media is neither 
necessary nor desirable.

> There are too many pieces involved with running through the old Dual 
> turntable. Having the Audacity software listening to the turntable will 
> make the process smoother, too.

I heard from a friend who went through the process of digitizing his vinyl 
that there was some feedback and noise introduced by running the turntable 
(with a rather sensitive magnetic cartridge) near the computer systems. 
He went through the trouble of setting up the turntable far away and then 
running straight, high-quality analog lines into his fancy soundcard.

> I did make good recordings with the old setup, though. I plugged the 
> line out of the stereo amp into the line in of my Creative Labs sound 
> card and ran gramofile on my 200 MHz RH 7.0 machine. After recording, I 
> ran the clean up filters supplied with gramofile and then converted the 
> .wav file to .mp3 with bladeenc. Both of these programs are run from the 
> command line. I'll be interested to see how Audacity handles the 
> process. It would be nice if it can record an LP, clean it up, and 
> convert it to .mp3 with flipping the platter over being the only thing I 
> have to do besides hit start. I realize that I'll have to do some 
> tweaking of record levels and such up front, though.

And you'll probably end up manually applying the track cuts.

I gotta say, I ripped my entire CD collection (only about 500 discs) in 
one weekend (with fairly meticulous metadata entry and cross-checking, 
though there are still a handful of errors that I find now and again).  I 
think the vinyl will take much longer even though I have a tenth as many 
discs.

I guess instead of looking into the USB turntable, my next step will be 
trying to get the digital input from the bookshelf system into the 
soundcard on my PC.

Interestingly, I bought this bookshelf system in the first place because 
it has a PS/2 keyboard port for titling minidiscs.  How badass is that?  I 
was disappointed to learn that the keyboard couldn't be used as a general 
purpose editting console, though.  Seems like it would have been just as 
easy to define the function keys to do some or all of the things that the 
remote control keys do.

J.
-- 
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      Jeme A Brelin
     jeme at brelin.net
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