Ion TTUSB Turntable

very good turntable just plug in to usb port works great Read instructions carefully about the weight of the turntable arm. Tom

First the cons; It's not automatic so it requires monitoring during recording. The RCA cords are permanently attached and somewhat in the way. If you are using a MAC you need a lot of patience. It took me three days and tech support to get it working. Audacity can be just that. MAC's need LameLib in order for Audacity to save as MP3. After three days I finally got LameLib downloaded and working with Audacity. However, than all I could get on the recording was heavy static after 5 minutes. I found that The MAC needed to be set at 48000 in order to stop this from happening. After a week of a lot of frustration I finally got everything working. Saying it converts to MP3 on a MAC is somewhat misleading. Now for the PRO's; The software and player do a good job. I have gone through a number of LP's with good success. Practice makes it better once you get it working. I am not disappointed in it.

The Ion USB Turntable was a gift that held much promise to convert vinyl recordings to MP3 files to add to my iPod. The unit looks and sounds great as the records play through the Apple G-5's sound card. Unfortunately the recordings are in wav format and you have to download additional software (LAME MP3 Encoder) to convert the wav file to mp3. The link they provided is a dead end, and the forums are full of comments by other users who have exactly the same problem. There may be a solution somewhere for Mac users (a number of work-arounds are suggested in the forums), but after several hours I have been unable to find anything that works. Note that the authors of several positive reviews used different software to make this product work.

I've got a huge vinyl library that dates back to my life in the 60s. We've moved a few times and always carried our collection with, damp basements, hot barns, the records have been everywhere. We've added music over the years because some things are just not available on CD. Well, recently we changed our audio setup and we no longer had room for our turntable. I use a Mac so I picked up an iMic but was never happy with the quality or the software. I decided to go with the the Ion because it looked like a simple setup and it worked with Macs. It is a little larger than I expected, but I got over that. It came partially disassembled, but the directions were clear and the setup was easy for me. The adjustment of the tone arm took the longest, but I wanted to make sure it was right. The Audacity software loaded and works fine on my MacBook Pro running Leopard 10.5.4. It was intuitive and easy to learn although I have not used it to it's full capacity yet. What I like about listenin... Read more

To me a good product is 4 star, something exceptional to make it 5, one off for each significant drawback. The two with ION TTUSB: -the EZ Vinyl Software generates frequent 'cannot convert file' messages when converting to itunes, whereupon it must start over converting the LP, even if it successfully converted several tracks. Eventually it gets through all the tracks in an LP, then you have to sort through and get rid of the tracks it successfully converted on the failed tries, to avoid clutter in your itunes: workable but annoying. I've heard suggestions this is caused when itunes was already installed before you got EZV, but it's just poor design not to have thought somebody would already have itunes installed and not want to mess with it. -faint ground loop hum noise on the recordings. Again possible extraordinary measures would fix it, but it just shouldn't be there. Otherwise the EZ Vinyl software is also clunky to use in more minor ways (for example inevitable long pause in... Read more