ion portable usb turntable
As much as we love listening to vinyl at the FSS, it always made me crazy that when the cassette walkman became obsolete, I couldn’t easily take my records on the go anymore. Digitizing records to MP3 will never be the same as the days of analog and magnetic recording to cassette tape.
For the past ten years or so I’ve been going nuts trying to find the perfect method for digitizing my record collection without compromising sound or making things overly complicated. Nothing I’ve tried has been without some level of headache and heartbreak.
Currently I have been using the Griffin iMic to connect my STR-D315 Sony receiver to my Mac, and I can say that thus far this is the best method yet in terms of ease of use and quality of results. So that begs the question, “Why did I go and buy a USB Turntable anyway?”. Maybe I thought it’d be the penultimate method I’ve been searching a decade for, maybe I couldn’t pass up a 50% off deal on Woot.com. Maybe the idea of having a portable turntable had me thinking I could carry this thing everywhere and not have to digitize my music in the first place. Maybe I was wrong.
The bottom line is I wasted my money. Do not buy this model and search other reviews if you are looking at different models. It’s a cheaply made and poor sounding with one built in mono speaker. It takes a whopping four D batteries (so much for portable). And the software it comes with is straight up whack. Making things even worse I have yet to get this thing to work with my computer on any level. This was not worth the $50 I paid for it, let alone the $100 retail mark it usually carries.
I had such high hopes the day this came in the mail and I first tore into the packaging, only to find what amounted to a Fisher Price record player with a new coat of paint to make it look more sophisticated. If I still had my Incredible Hulk 7” and Muppets LPs maybe I’d be more okay with it.
The only use I could imagine getting out of it is throwing it on my deck in the summer, but even at that the internal speaker’s sound is shoddy at best and probably wouldn’t fill the space adequately. I’d rather just keep with my current boombox and forego the vinyl.
The plastic and parts used to make this thing feel like they came out of a 99 cent store. I’m not even sure you can change the needle if it gets warn out (although since I’m not using it, that won’t be a concern anyway).
It comes with two separate programs for your computer. The first, EZ Audio Converter, is painfully simple and limited. Hit record and go. And the second, Audacity, is the exact opposite, complicated and far from user friendly. But who cares, I was never able to get either program to work with my computer and record sound anyway. In fact, both times I plugged the Ion into my computer I lost sound entirely as it took over my computer’s sound card and continued to hijack it even after I unplugged it to the point where I was forced to do a hard restart.
Currently I’m back to using my iMic and its Final Vinyl Software and happy once more. The Ion now has moved to the corner of shame in my basement, next to my MiniDisc player, VCR, and Dreamcast VMUs.
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