 "Decent Enough" | 2009-10-13 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1A2IKFUQRH90S |
I purchased mine lightly used for $83, and for that price I am happy, though I don't believe this item is worth it's MSRP. It imports the music into your computer wonderfully, the tone arm and cartridge are both sturdy.
My only concerns with the turntable is that it is very sensitive to vibrations, so while I'm recording I have to sit very still and not touch my desk, otherwise it'll be picked up in the recording, this is partially because it is made out of plastic (which doesn't shock absorb quite as well as metal). And partially because it's a turntable (which turntables are known to pick up a little as well)
My other concern is that the platter is plastic rather than metal, which I fear may warp over time. Also the platter doesn't sit down in it's crater far enough.
Also the 45RPM adapter is ok, but a real 45 adapter would work better. (sometimes the record slips under my 45 adapter during play, which, obviously makes it not play correctly. |
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 "Good Buy" | 2009-07-13 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2CW33B0FMQA4H |
| I just purchased this Ion turntable($99) from Costco and I was very reluctant because of many past reviews. Just finished recording/converting my first LP and putting it on a CD. Approx 90 minutes total but about 30 minutes wasted because of a dumb mistake. All in all this is a great divice and well worth the price. It is almost plug-n-play. |
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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 $100 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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| "You Won't Be Disappointed" | 2009-03-28 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3NZZ6CPGBHPYQ |
| If you are someone that wants to hear your vinyl records again this could be the turntable for you. It has been over 20 years since I heard my collection of 400+ vinyl records. I just didn't have the time or energy to transfer my collection to digital. That is until now. After opening the box I was transferring my music within 5 minutes and I am not a computer expert. It cannot be made any easier. It comes with two software packages, Audacity and EZ Vinyl Converter. I use EZ Vinyl Converter because it is easier and no learning curve is required. The software automatically sends your selections to Itunes after recording. It even recognizes the artist and title tracks to most of the selections. The recording quality is very good and I am sure most people will find it acceptable. I used to have a Denon turntable with a Magnapan tone arm and a Denon 103D moving coil cartridge. [...] For those of you that consider yourselves audiophiles you may be disappointed in the construction of this turntable. This is not a Linn Sondek, but if you just want to be able to hear your wonderful vinyl recordings again on your Ipod or through your computer then do not delay. Go and buy this turntable. |
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| "No problems here" | 2009-03-19 |
| - Reviewed By smcohen3 |
I must admit I was a bit leery of this USB turntable after reading other reader reviews. Although many folks raved about it, a nearly equal number complained about cheesy build and poor performance. But when Costco had it on sale for $[...], I couldn't resist. After about a month with the ION TTUSB 10, my evaluation is very positive.
No one has ever disputed its good looks -- the thing just looks great with its steel-grey finish, gracefully rounded corners, and solid, wide stance. Of course, the steel-grey color is misleading -- it's all plastic, and that had me worried, as other buyers complained of a warped or wobbly platter. But my platter, at least, does not wobble a bit. The rotation is smooth and level, and the tone arm tracks very nicely. I haven't tried going for a lower setting than the recommended 3.5 grams (way higher than I use with the Shure stylus that's attached to my "normal" Technics quartz direct drive turntable). But the results are good with the stock setting, and since each vinyl disc needs to be played only once on the ION, the issue of disc wear seems to be a non-starter.
So physically, this is a very well designed and well engineered unit, and, despite its plastic components, very solidly built. The only shortcomings I can detect are in the accompanying software. Although Audacity (a freeware product) is bundled with the turntable, most users will probably turn to the included ez Vinyl Converter (by MixMeister) because of its simplicity. True, it doesn't have Audacity's capability to remove pops and cracks and other noise on your vinyl, or to record at higher speed (record at 45 rpm and reduce to 33 via software -- a nice time-saver), or to select the format and compression ratio of your imported file. But if your vinyl records are clean and in good condition, you won't need those extra niceties, in which case the simplicity of ez Vinyl will be very appealing. Just plug in the turntable, start the software, play the record, and the software does the rest. (It can even be set to divide the record into tracks automatically.) The tracks you've recorded will be automatically imported into your iTunes folder.
A big plus in ez Vinyl Converter is supposed to be that it is integrated with Gracenote Music ID. This means that (if you're connected to the Internet) the conversion software will check with Gracenote to enter the artist, album, and track titles of what you've recorded. Sometimes Gracenote recognizes the record, but more often, it does not. In that case, you can help it by typing in the artist and record title, in which case it will almost surely find the title in its database. It will then prompt you with track titles as it proceeds to convert the audio you've uploaded into mp3 format. But here's where things get buggy. Often, when you've finished importing one side of an album, you will find in your iTunes folder that the same track has been listed several times. Usually, only one of these is a genuine recording, and the others are bogus -- there's no recording there, just a title that doesn't link to any recording. So that title has to be manually deleted. Occasionally, it will place two (or even three!) genuine copies of the same track in your folder (even though you only played the track once on the turntable). In that case, you'll have to delete the duplicates manually. Sometimes it assigns the titles wrong (again, you can fix that manually), and occasionally misses the last few seconds of a track (which requires a delete and re-record of that track). And it almost always gets the track order jumbled (if only because the recording of the two sides of a disc are "separate events" -- the importation of side A into iTunes must be completed before side B is begun). Again, you can fix this in iTunes by manually entering the order of the tracks on the Info tab for the album. It's not difficult, just annoying, and certainly not slickly automated. Don't plan on converting more than a few albums per day -- it'll wear you out.
So, bottom line: this is a terrific piece of hardware. It's handsome, accurate, and well built. I'm hoping that the buggy ez Vinyl Converter v. 2.1.0.9 (the latest version, now almost a year old) will be upgraded to deal with the many problems I've noted. I'd also look for this product at a better price than the $[...]+ at which Amazon is listing it these days. |
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| "Ion turntable TTUSB10" | 2009-01-11 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3DOZIRKJFN6JX |
| Product does everything as advertised. Could use better instruction book, but keep trying and you'll find out how to use it. Great tone, great product. |
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