 "Skips and only manual" | 2009-06-18 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1KJO5VP4K3CHU |
I have over 150 LP's that I wanted to transfer to audio files and this device seemed like the answer to my problem. It works, but requires much more effort than I expected. The turntable is completely manual, so you have to put the tone arm in place and remove it when you are done. Thus, you have to stay next to the unit to remove the arm when the recording is done. That would be OK, but there is an excessive amount of skipping. To overcome this I had to weight the tone arm and eventually I had to wedge up one side to force the arm not to repeat the same section over and over. Skipping is an annoyance when you are listening to music, but it is even worse when you are trying to make a copy. This skipping required at least two tries per side to get an acceptable file. The software is OK, but you end up with a new file per track or all tracks per side in a single file. I also have my doubts concerning the long term reliability of this unit. The motor is connected to the turntable by means of a rubber belt and I expect that eventually this belt will break or stretch, making the turntable slip or cease operation altogether when it breaks.
At $100 this unit is OK and worth 3 stars. (I am giving it more than one star because it does work and will do the job if you are not too particular. A true audiophile would probable give it only one star because the overall mechanical quality of the turntable is marginal and I found that the resulting audio quality was only acceptable.)
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 "Quick, Easy, & Oh So Cool!" | 2009-05-27 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1T36KBC2KWHWD |
| This products makes me want to go out and buy more LP's! It is so easy to transfer my whole collection of LP's into MP3's directly into my iTunes library. Great product! |
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 "EZ? No! Turntable... barely. There has got to be a better way." | 2009-05-01 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2B42BMSCRMX2M |
I do not know what the good reviewers have, but the version of the TTUSB10 I got at Costco for $[...] was a total disappointment. It came with software called EZ-Vinyl converter. This software required you to demark tracks in real-time while listening to the record. If you slip up, I don't know what happens because that was a show-stopper right there. My first and last conversion was an EP with one track on each side. I was not offered a prompt to demark when the record was flipped. I would have thought that all of that demarking tracks would be handled in post-processing and not require my undivided attention while transcoding.
It did come with a rather remarkable program called Gracenote. By merely recording tracks, and the ones I was recording were fairly obscure, Gracenote would name that tune. That is fairly impressive technology, being able to derive title and artist by sound recognition alone. While it did identify the track and artist and gave me a list of several recordings where the track was found, it did not identify the entire disc. Therefore, it did nothing to identify the exact tracks and times so that a CD could be created with the same tracks and times. I am not sure it would have anyway.
The result of transcoding and analysis had to be passed-on to iTunes to proceed to the CD burning process. I don't do MAC or iPod, so I found iTunes to be a hinderance to completing the process. No where along the way was I offered an opportunity to clean up the clicks and pops via audio processing, a minor annoyance. I expect any such processing would detract from the very nuance of old recordings that one would buy this turntable to try and preserve.
That is to say, if this turntable could reproduce them in the first place. I already had a turntable, and a fairly old one at that... so I tried the Ion in hopes that I could use it as my main one, and put the old one away as a backup. This turntable could not hold a candle to my 25+ year old Denon DP-11F that I bought used for around $90 nearly 20 years ago. I haven't done a thing to that Denon since I bought it except replace the stylus at that time. It has never failed me since. You would have to be seriously hearing impaired not to notice the dramatic difference between the new Ion and the old Denon.
Never mind that the old Denon is microprocessor controlled and the tonearm moves with the touch of a button making it much more user-friendly than the Ion... it sounds remarkably better. It is astounding to me that in this day and age you can buy a CD player capable of guiding a microscopic laser beam to read the microscopic tracks of a CD for the price of a dozen rolls of toilet paper. All that under computer control at the touch of a button. I realize that the low cost of this amazing feat is in part derived from the vast number of CD players sold. Still, I feel cheated that I cannot get 1982 conveniences in a 2009 turntable.
Add up the poor playback, lack of ergonomics, cheap feel, and unjustafiably large size of the Ion turntable and you get something less than the sum of its parts. Keep in mind I am comparing it to a unit that has not been maintained in nearly 20 years. I have a mind to look for another old Denon in the auctions. The software provided with the Ion was hoped to at least make it easy for the casual user to go from a vinyl record to a CD as easy as possible, and I did not experience that. It went back to the store, and I cannot reccommend it as a turntable or a vinyl archiving solution.
I am still seeking a better way to do this and I have come closer than I think I would have if I'd continued to work with the solution provided by this product. I will never know because I was so quickly disappointed by the Ion solution. I suppose there will be a few who have grown-up with vinyl will find the Ion to be an acceptable solution. The Ion may actually be an okay choice for those who did not grow-up with vinyl. For me, no way.
The failure of the Ion did inspire me to try a few things. Those with MP3 players that have line-in jacks could just plug them into the headphone jacks of their stereos and adjust the volume to match can create pretty good MP3 files. These will still have to be post-processed.
I am someone who knew only vinyl and cassettes for music. Only later did there become floppy disks.... which preceeded CD's. So I am somewhere between the vinyl-only and CD-only generations. While this is primarily intended to be a review of the Ion product, I have seen others post alternative approaches to solving this problem. As I start in my title, "there has got to be a better way." I started with getting my $100 refunded and using the equipment and software I had already had available.
My existing system has and old cassette deck and put it into record mode (this was the old way we archived vinyl). I connected its headphone output to my laptop computer microphone input and adjusted the level. How? I used the freeware Audacity program downloaded from the Audacity website. It shows a graphic output as you are recording so you know when you are in range. I sampled a few tracks from the vinyl to be sure I didn't go into 'clipping'.
I then started recording and went on to do something else, somewhere else. When I happened to notice the side was done, I paused the recording and flipped the album. I recorded the other side and was able to use Audacity to eliminate the excess at the beginning and end of the album, as well as the garbage recorded around the flip.
The resultant was a long wave file I imported into Nero Wave Editor, a part of a software product I had purchased years earlier for around $90. It allowed me to view the recording in a graphical format and fairly easily notice where track breaks were and demark them so that they would later be exported as individual files. It took some time at first, but I am convinced I could do a 20 track album in 10 minutes of post processing (instead of listening for them for 45 minutes). I exported the tracks and the playlist which were pleasingly imported into Nero Express as I had hoped, in track order.
I created a burn which, once tested in a real-world situation was deficient in that the tracks were not divided where they should have been. At the end of the day though, I was pleased that I was able to preserve a beloved vinyl recording in a very close to failthful way. I still have some work to to, but the Ion showed no promise of making it easier to make it happen and lacked the sound quality I have come to rely on from decades old equipment. There still has got to be a better way.
- Pinbyte
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| "VERY SATISFIED" | 2009-04-26 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2SUILTZSHAJSC |
| I RECEIVED MY TURNTABLE IN LESS THAN A WEEK AND IMMEDIATELY I OPENED THE BOX TO FIND EVERYTHING WAS THERE. I HAD TO ASSEMBLE A FEW PARTS BUT IT WAS A SIMPLE PROCESS.....IN FACT, IN LESS THAN 15 MINUTES I WAS LISTENING TO MY RECORD ALBUMS AND 45'S....THE QUALITY WAS EXCELLENT. MY UNIT WAS CONSIDERED A "SCRATCH 'N DENT" UNIT BUT I HAVE YET TO FIND A SCRATCH OR DENT ANYWHERE.....YES, I'M VERY SATISFIED AND RECOMMEND THIS TURNTABLE TO ANYONE.....AT THIS PRICE HOW CAN YOU GO WRONG..... |
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 "Great technology, but. . ." | 2009-04-24 |
| - Reviewed By User: A270HMEX1E8Y4P |
| The product is absolutely amazing and works exactly as advertised. The biggest problem I had, and the reason I didn't give it five stars, is that the instruction manual isn't as clear as it should be. I haven't been able to separate tracks, although I've followed everything to the letter. Some step in the process is not indicated in the instruction book. The equipment works well; the tech writer who wrote the manual needs to go back to step one and write instructions for those of us who are novices and doing this for the first time. |
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| "Meh" | 2009-04-22 |
| - Reviewed By wander95 |
I had to downgrade (read: hack) an audio driver on my Macbook to get the USB audio to work. I have no idea if it has been fixed as of this review (this was last Summer) but why it gotta be like that?
Once I had the usb audio driver working, I realized the Ion turntable itself had no grounding apparatus; its signal was awash in white noise. The last thing I want to hear when I am archiving vinyl is noise. I managed to use some analogue trickery a la McGuyver to keep the noise low, but it never went away fully.
My 3rd and final gripe? If you listen closely, there is weird analogue-to-digital conversion noise that gets recorded. Sounds like robots mumbling to one another. Did I mention it gets recorded?
If you are STRAPPED for cash and absolutely NEED a usb vinyl solution...Then I guess you gotta do what you gotta do. But for any serious vinyl archiver, I would look into other solutions than this model. |
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| "Voice of the Mummy Game Recordings" | 2009-04-19 |
| - Reviewed By User: A27IEUCJXGEV22 |
This unit works perfect for the small records from games of the past. I used this unit because it didnt have the tone arm reset built into it. The record is very small and because of the anti slip mat the record stayed in place during all of the recordings.
The editing software works fine. It's quick to edit and easily removes the unwanted pops and clicks. It also has other software features to adjust the speed which was needed because of the custom speed these small records needed.
Visit www.yourprojectman.com and listen to the Mummy sounds and from the other Milton Bardley Game from 1972 Seance. Great job ION. |
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| "An easy way to convert your LP's" | 2009-04-13 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1L3BC5GAKCI18 |
| The turntable hooked up easily and the software installed quickly. Inserting the breaks between tracks can be cumbersome. |
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| "Service" | 2009-03-18 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2P428HWGKM1TD |
| The ION TTUSB USB Turntable with USB record. It was shipped and arrived with a week. in a well padded original box. After unpacking I discovered it was missing the USB cable and the software to install and use the Turntable. It arrived on a Saturday and I called the shipper on Monday. they placed a missing parts order with ION and the missing parts was in my hands by the end of that week. The software is very easy to use (recording) I havent taken the time to learn how to clean the noise that is for another time. The only thing I would have liked to have is a lid of some kind. |
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| "Good deal" | 2009-03-03 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3CMBN9AGIZVYB |
| Works as billed. The nice thing is that you can just plug it into your stereo and use it to replace your old turntable, when not using it to convert your vinyl to mp3. It was about as cheap to get this replacement turntable as it would have been to replace the cartridge and needle on my aging 80s-era model. |
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