Digitizing Vinyl, Part Three: The Turntable

People have devoted their entire lives to the hard science and analog voodoo of The Turntable. Huge tomes have been written analyzing the virtues of the straight VS curved tone arms. Wars have been fought over the different configurations of cartridges and types of needles... and the design of them can go from extreme to weird to beautifully architectural. If you looking for that level of debate, please keep surfing. The following is strictly my opinion, for educational use only, buyer beware, don't try this at home:

My first set up for digitizing records was a Techniques 1200 MKII turntable with a Stanton 680 EL Cartridge, plugged into a Vestax Mix Stick mixer, using an M-Audio Firewire A to D converter into my Mac Laptop running Peak LE to record. And it sounded OK. Sorta. The 1200 MKII has been a standard club turntable for decades. Its a direct drive workhorse with loads of torque and solid timing... but its not an audiophiles dream come true. The deal is, you want to keep noise out of the signal, and with a direct drive unit, the platter is essentially sitting right on top of the motor. If you use a belt driven unit, it makes it easier to isolate the motor from the platter, helping reduce vibration that might be picked up by the needle. Thats the theory anyway, the reality is that it isn't easy to hear that kind of noise during the loud parts of the music, but I wanted to get the cleanest grab that I could. Like I mentioned earlier, digitizing records is a pain, so I wanted to do it once, and get it over with. Frankly, the Vestax mixer was a bigger part of my equation, but I'll be addressing that in a later post.

Once I realized that I needed to upgrade, I started looking into USB turntables, this was in early 2007. At the time Ion was starting to get a name for is products, so I read some reviews. Several of them noted that the unit didn't have a grounding line, and there was a very slight hum. In the olden days, turntables had a ground line that was connected to the receiver to prevent an electrical hum. If the reviews were correct, it seemed like USB didn't quite fully ground the Ion units, but I wasn't sure. Being a gadgety guy I decided to jump into USB anyway. I bought a Stanton USB turntable at Guitar Center... And you know what? It hummed. A very soft 60 cycle hum. It went back to the shop the same day, and I swore off USB until they had real ground lines.

So with that option done, I decided to buy the cheapest new turntable I could that would still produce a clean signal. I found two contenders, the Rega P1 and the Sumiko Pro-ject Debut III. After reading reviews, I couldn't decided between the two, so I bought the first one I found in stock at a neighborhood Hi-Fi store. I'm a proud owner of a Rega P1. Generally I'm happy with it, although switching between LP and 45 means removing the platter and moving the belt from one pulley to another. Which is actually kind of cool. It comes with an Ortofon cartridge which sounds good, but it can't take too much weight. Some of the old Jamaican 45's I have been restoring need 3 or more grams of weight to get them to play through, but really that is my problem, not Rega's. I do still believe I'm picking up some rumble from the motor, but It's acceptable. It damn sure doesn't hum. So With the turntable issue solved, next came the preamp.