Aldi cassette player

[meow2222]

They've got cassette players on Sunday for =A312.99. Seems a high price for= an obsolete item.

NT

[John Williamson]

obsolete item.

It's actually also a converter that plays a cassette and puts out a digital audio stream on a USB connection. WDM compatible, and if it doesn't come with a copy of Audacity, it should work with it. It'll probably work with Linux as well, as a basic in only sound card.

If I didn't already have a deck that did the conversion in both directions, I'd have bought one last time I was in. They've been in my local store for months now, ever since they couldn't get rid of the first delivery.

[John Rumm]

obsolete item.

Try buying some fast page or EDO RAM! Obsolete can just mean rare and short supply, not always a good formula for cheap.

[Adam Funk]

obsolete item.

Yup, I've got a laser printer that's something like 8 years old, but I can't (practically) add memory to it --- if the drum fails or something like that, I'll end up getting a duplex printer for less than the memory upgrade.

[Adam Funk]

obsolete item.

I'm not sure you can count on that. I tried all sorts of configuration contortions to get an external USB sound device to work on Linux; fortunately Maplin took it back. That was probably 2 years ago, though.

I wonder how the sound quality is. I've actually got a hi-fi component tape deck which I could move upstairs and connect directly to a computer line-in. I guess that wouldn't work with the turntable's (lower power) output, though?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Unless the turntable has a pre-amp built in, no. The output direct from the pickup cartridge is very low - and it also needs the appropriate RIAA equalisation applied.

[John Williamson]

an obsolete item.

For converting vinyl, you need either an impedance converting amp (>2 meg input for ceramic cartridges) or an RIAA equalising amp for a magnetic cartridge, either way, from thirty quid up. I run the deck into an amp with a decent pre-amp, then use the Tape 2 output for r

[Brian Gaff]

No players of any kind of goodness will set you back about 30 quid. Its a mechanical item after all. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

They are crap, no dolby or dbx.

Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

But once in the digital domain apply it there. B-)

[John Williamson]

I do. There's an excellent plugin for Winamp that lets you adjust for all sorts of things including phase and frequency response problems caused by misaligned heads. It will also let you apply different types of Dolby decoding.

[Adam Funk]

Well, I've got an amp that plays the turntable fine through the speakers; it's just on the wrong floor from the computer with a line-in jack.

[Adam Funk]

That's what I thought (hence the importance of connecting the turntable to the "PHONO" input on the amp).

[Adam Funk]

It's less hassle if the external device does it for you --- although I imagine the hassle decreases a lot with experience/repetition.

[John Williamson]

It depends how good you need it to be. The gold standard is a Nakamichi Dragon self aligning deck to compensate for azimuth errors, and running a Dolby alignment tape through it to set up the Dolby circuitry. Then fiddling with the settings because the Dolby wasn't set up correctly at record time.

That's handy if you've got a decent ADC and a grand or two to spare for the deck for the time you'll be using it. You can normally get 90% or more of your money back after you've done the project. For most (not all) home recorded tapes a halfway decent deck and the DSP plugin comes as close as you're likely to get to the original. The odds are you'll need to fiddle with the EQ anyway, so it's no big deal to do it all in one place.

[Adam Funk]

Umm, for my home-recorded tapes of radio shows from the late 1980s, I'm not going to blow a big budget.