HiFi (OT)

You could always buy a turntable for 50 quid , cart included.....

Turntable that costs more will still be able to extract more from the groov e than a pin through a polystyrene cup ;-)

Higher range ones don't seem to appear in adverts like the cheapo ones.

Vinyl surface noises sounds horrible when compressed at low bit rates and cartridges in cheap decks will almost certainly be ceramic.

The MP3 result will be lifeless if there was any life in the original studio performance.

That might not matter ...

I suppose if you make billions of them the price comes down. But the precision a decent turntable, arm and cartridge were made to in the good ol' days suggests otherwise. A replacement stylus for my Ortofon cart. costs more than one of these USB turntables. ;-) Also, it was never simple making a good sounding RIAA preamp. Let alone one which does that for a USB input.

Not worth it when you can just download an MP3. I consider it just a legal to do so as recording the record. Neither will get you into trouble.

Rubbish, but probably better than the old SP25s people had.

It doesn't need to though. You just post process the digital to correct it. As long as the DtoA is good enough it will be better than preamp equalization (for some value of better).

Neighbours had to send back two, to get a third working one, I haven't heard the results.

Do that in software on the PC.

is my entire LP collection available on MP3? even if it were, it would cost me quite a lot to duplicate music that I already have.

still got to do a proper input buffer-with-gain stage though.

Is that as easy as it once was, I was lucky about 5 or so years ago when I was looking for stuff I had on vinyl, I found quite a bit on what would now be illegal I assume, plus I got some stuff I didn't know existed.

You might do but the record industry doesn't well they're after money that' s all. In theory I should be able to prove I have a vinyl and be able to get the M P3 or ACC almost free.

It's those 'sharing' their music that get into trouble.

I'm surprised by the number of folk who have got rid of their record playing equipment, but kept all their LPs. My niece's hubby is one such. Given how much space LPs take to store. He was apparently getting one of these USB turntables for Xmas so he could digitize his LP collection. I did say he could come here and do it properly. ;-)

I got rid of my Dual 505 turntable when it stopped working took it apart an d the band had perished after just 30 years ! same with my cassette deck. My NAD 3130 seems to only work on one channel, my mordn short speakers take up too much space and my only working bit of hifi is a graphic equaliser I only used when watching VHS films and music on VHS. I still have most of this stuff just sitting in the loft incluing 2 VHS mac hines a Mac SE30 a Macplus a LC475 and quite a bit of other stuff that's of little use. I still have all my old vinyl a few feet in physical size. Glad I kept it and didn;t through it all out years ag, only found out last year that I had a rae alladine sane gatefold with misprint.

Not something you can get with MP3s

I assume singles too.

Well if it;s a collectable hobby collectign cars takes more space even if y ou've a thing about angle grinder they take up space too most hobbies to, l ook at all the wasted space taken up by books when you can have them in PDF or whatever.

So you no longer bother with a Hi-Fi, but listen to music from your iPhone only?

Well they are cheap turntables end of story. Its like the cassette to mp3 devices its junk mostly. I would say a normal turntable with a decent cartridge will always be better just stuck into one of those cheap behringer usb sound boxes, the one with the switchable raii/line in phonos. Wonderful with even my Technichs sl5a and Or too concord cart. Indeed ortofon seem to have rebranded their carts as Vinyl reclamation series or some such twaddle.

The big part is the software you use on the transferred audio. Use wav not mp3 and carefully apply noise reduction and minimal click removal manually per track. You could get a posh expensive set of software to do it but half the fun is doing it manually and ending up with a cd that sounds very nice indeed. Brian

I kept my turntable but there's a rubber band in it that has metamorphosed into something rather sticky.

correct. I now prefer to go and see live music when I can.

Never listened to music on my iphone I've only had it a few weeks, only got a SIM for it last week. When I've litened to music it's been via my iMac with although Version 1

for most uses my iMac is enough I also watch music videos on yuotube and that's good enough I find.

BTW, uk.rec.audio is still quite active.

Why on earth would you want the crappiest format possible, instead of a more modern lossless high bitrate encoding?

operly. ;-)

Same with mine.