Ion iTTUSB Turntable with USB Record
by Ion
List Price: $139.99
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from and sold by Beach Audio
28 new or used available from $50.00
Product Description
The first USB turntable that lets you convert your old vinyl collection directly to CD or MP3, the Ion Audio iTTUSB is a must for people who don’t want to deal with clumsy adapters or mismatched software when transferring formats. Requiring no special drivers, the turntable comes with Audacity, a recording application that works with both PCs and Macs, as well a trial version of Bias Soundsoap 2 to clean and restore vinyl recordings. As an alternative, the turntable also works with any other software that supports USB audio input sound cards. Once connected, the turntable transfers both 33-1/3 rpm albums and 45 rpm singles to digital formats in mere minutes. The iTTUSB also offers a few hardware extras, such as an adjustable anti-skating control for increased stereo balancing, an adjustable pitch control (+/- 8 percent), and support for high-speed vinyl recording. And thanks to the line-level outputs, you can connect to any home stereo with CD or auxiliary (AUX) inputs–no phono inputs required. The turntable comes with a cartridge and stylus, 45 adapter, and USB cable and is compatible with PCs running Windows 98, 2000, or XP and Macs running OS 9 or greater. All computers must also have at least one available USB 1.1 port.
The iTTUSB’s master carton measures 20.27 by 6.85 by 17.16 inches (W x H x D) while the turntable itself weighs 7.7 pounds.
What’s in the Box
Turntable, tonearm counterweight, platter with belt, slipmat, cartridge premounted on headshell, RCA cable, USB cable, software CD-ROM, 45 adapter, quick-start guide, user’s manual.
Product Description
Hear Ye, Hear Ye! See the first USB turntable for converting your old vinyls directly to CD or MP3 with the included recording software (No special drivers needed!). It includes Audacity software for Mac/PC for recording and a trial of Bias Soundsoap 2 for cleaning and restoring vinyl quality. In addition, the ION iTTUSB turntable also has line level output for connecting to any home stereo with CD or auxiliary (AUX) inputs. It is compatible with any software that supports USB audio input sound cards. CD with Mac/PC recording software 33 1/3 and 45 RPM. Adjustable Anti-Skating control for increased stereo balancing High speed vinyl recording Line level RCA outputs 1/8 stereo line input so you can digitize music from cassettes or other sources Computer Requirements - PC running Windows 98, 2000, or XP / Mac running OS9 or greater / One available USB port Set-up required to mount turntable and adjust tone-arm
Customer Reviews
“Surprisingly good, surprisingly bad (and now better)” by Ethan Zuckerman (Williamstown, MA USA)
On the one hand, the Ion works quite well. It’s easy to set up, produces surprisingly good quality sound, and turns the whole process of digitizing vinyl into a two-device, three step process… rather than the four device, multi-step process I’d been using.
On the other hand, the software included with the turntable is a bad joke, at least for Mac users. There’s no installation software - Ion includes the source code for Audacity and expects you to compile it yourself. (You’d be much better off downloading it compiled from Sourceforge.) There’s a complex process involving Audio MIDI setup, including a workaround for a nasty bug regarding sound quality setup. Once you get it working, it’s quite impressive, but it’s very far from user friendly. Let’s hope this gets better in future releases of the product, because the hardware is nicely designed and the results are quite impressive.
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Updated January 16, 2008.
Ion’s software support for this product and Macintosh has gotten much, much better since I wrote this review, 18 months ago. The current software doesn’t require any fiddling with the MIDI settings on Mac, as the turntable now mounts in your Sound control panel as an audio input. And they’ve done a nice job of filtering the audio that comes through this input so that you can get excellent results saving directly from Audacity, without equalizing or filtering, as was pretty much necessary in the original release. I would modify my three star rating to four stars - the turntable still needs a speed control and a dust cover, but the software’s much better.
