Product Review: Numark USB Turntable

Whether you're a rabid collector with stacks-o-wax on your shelves, or the casual music fan with a few favorite record albums tucked away in a closet, the Numark USB Turntable (model TTUSB) will help you bring your vinyl into the 21st century, converting your treasured recordings into digital music files.

Numark is a well-known name in the field of electronics, providing the gear of choice for many club deejays. Numark currently offers traditional turntables, microphones, professional CD players and mixers and even DJ packages for the "prosumer" market.

The Numark TTUSB includes an USB audio interface that plugs directly into a spare USB port on your desktop or notebook computer. The turntable is self-powered, plugging directly into a wall socket or surge protector. The plug-in cartridge and turntable belt both install quickly, and the top-mounted controls are intuitive and easy to reach. The turntable includes a built-in pre-amp with a pair of line-level RCA plugs, which is geek-speak meaning that you can plug the turntable into your regular stereo or computer soundcard and use it to just spin records, if that's all what you want.

The Numark TTUSB also includes a lot of features that used to only be found on higher-end turntables, including an adjustable anti-skate control for increased stereo balancing and adjustable pitch control that is precise to within +/- 10% accuracy. The unit plays both 33 1/3 and 45 rpm vinyl, and with some fancy software manipulation, you can also record antique 78 rpm shellac.

One of the turntable's better features, especially for those of us with boxes of old live show tapes and scores of band demos, is the inclusion of a 1/8-inch stereo mini-jack connector. This feature allows you to record through the TTUSB from a cassette deck or other sound equipment with line-level capabilities. You'll need a patch cord for this function, something with a pair of standard stereo RCA plugs on one end and a 1/8-inch mini-jack on the other; luckily, Radio Shack and other home electronics retailers offer these Y-cords for around $5.00 each.

"Yeah," I hear you saying, "all of these features are swell and sound pretty nifty on paper, but how do they work in reality?" Well, non-believer, the Numark TTUSB comes bundled with a copy of the open-source Audacity software, an incredibly stout program with all of the bells-and-whistles that you would expect from lower-end home recording software costing a couple hundred bucks or more.

Audacity has easy-to-learn controls that even a complete dunce like me figured out in no time at all. The program includes filters to reduce the pops and crackling inherent in transferring vinyl, and can also sharply reduce hiss and tape noise from transferring cassette tapes. The program saves your recordings in a standard high-resolution "wav" file which you can then edit, inserting breaks between songs, or even slicing the songs to create digital "mash-ups" of different material. From the wav format you can convert songs to other digital sound formats, such as mp3 or flac. Audacity can also be used to record and edit from other sound sources, and you can even use it to create a podcast from your old vinyl or cassette tapes.

I set my TTUSB up directly on my desktop, positioned next to my video screen and between my Roland monitors. After I plugged the turntable into the computer, I discovered that the unit doesn't exactly have "plug-and-play" capabilities under Windows XP or Mac OS2...it automatically sets your default sound source to "USB Audio Codec," thus shutting off sound from your built-in drives. This is a minor hassle for those of us that play music from our computer CD drives, but it's also easily fixable. After a few minutes spent attending that small glitch, I was recording a rare old Dave Olney album in no time, and the results sounded great!

The Numark TTUSB provides a solid solution to a problem that many music collectors have: how do I convert my record albums and cassette tapes to a modern digital format? The unit requires a certain level of comfort with gadgets and with computer software to use efficiently, but it sets up in minutes and will have you recording, editing and even creating CD-Rs from your digital files with a minimum of hassle. Retailing for around $150, it's a small price to pay to rescue your treasured old recordings.