Current

Many own invaluable vinyl collection on which music can be heard that is currently not or in the worst case will never be available on CD again. But they would still like to listen to that music and not only on the gramophone.

We offer you quality dubbing from vinyl records to CD format.

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GRAMOPHONES ARE IN AGAIN

What to do with piles of old vinyl records?

Technology is progressing and this is the way it should be. But with technology developing also problems arise and we can mitigate them one way or another. Today we can simply and free of charge decant music we like from the internet (but we don't do that, everybody else does).  When vinyls were popular things were different. At that time, before cassettes arrived, it was impossible to dub vinyl record, so there was no piracy as we know it today. If you wanted to listen to your favourite perfomer you simply bought their vinyl record. The result today is hundreds of vinyl records of different perfomers laying around from times when my parents were young and of course no one listens to them anymore. Partly because younger generations don't like the perfomers and partly because we don't have the device – gramophone, which would reproduce the sound on the vinyl.

Put them on contemporary LP Gramophone!

Recenty I got an email from Conrad Electronic company and they were offering LP gramophone iTTUSB10 with USB connector for 85 € for their 85-th anniversary, tempting enough for me to take the opportunity and put the device to use. I waited for a day or two and the box with the forementioned content arrived. I started opening it with great expectations. I always try to use different devices without reading the instructions first and so I can quickly see if the device is user friendly – and this device definitely is. We don't need a lot of tehnical knowledge to connect USB gramophone to the computer. Windows XP itself took care of the necessary drivers (the device presents itself as a sound card) and the enclosed free of charge software Audacity is completely familiar to the user after a few clicks.

PRACTICE ASSESSMENT: excellent

Because it doesn't happen everyday to have USB LP gramophone, I used Michael Jackson's Thriller as a test record, a record which sold the most copies. I was more than pleasantly surprised. Sound quality literally bowled me over. I admit I don't have any professional experiences to talk about the quality of reproduced sound, but ears don't lie, the sound was straight out fantastic. I tested the device with friends as well and we all agreed that the vinyl tecnology is perfect.

Next to the excellent reproduction quality the gramophone also has some other great features: beside the audio exit, over which we can connect home music system, speakers or a computer, it also has audio input, on which we can connect an extra sound source and we can save it in the computer over the USB connector (useful for digitalisation of MC-cassettes and/or other sound sources), we can also play DJs and turn the driving engine off and create new music manually.

We can also set the direction (rewind) and the rotation speed of the record and we must not forget to mention the pause button. To sum up, it has everything we need. The only imperfection is non-automatic small handle function which holds the needle. In practice this means that at the end of the record it doesn't put itself in the primary position or turns off, but it just keeps on gliding at the edge of the vinyl.  It's bad if we want to use the gramophone for romantic purposes and unimportant if we will use it for the digitalisation of our vinyl collection.

We won't talk much about the software. Audiacity is simple enough programme and complexed at the same time, which offers us all we need for comfortable saving of different music sources. Saving follows the principle of perform – dubbing (the pause button is very useful here). In spite of the naive expectations the USB gramophone can't be managed over the computer. USB LP gramophone works and looks professional, execution accuracy and used materials are right. USB support is assured in systems with Windows Vista, XP, 2000, Mac with OS9 or newer. We also need a free USB 1.1 connector. Because we use USB connection exclusively for sound transmission, we can connect the gramophone with the computer also with ordinary audio cable on sound card without losing the functionalism and we can do digitalisation without the use of supported operation systems.

Moj mikro, Uroš Florjančič