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It's still disappointing to give a gift that's nonfunctional however. Several more records later and we discovered that the felt on the turntable was unevenly applied, causing a "hump" in the record's path under the needle, distorting the music. I bought this for my roommate as a Christmas/graduation present. When she opened it and threw a record on we noticed a distortion in the sound which we initially attributed to the record being warped. To be fair, we haven't contacted the manufacturer yet to see if this is something that could be repaired or replaced.
Not really, because I have lots of time. If your time is precious, maybe you should buy something more upscale; but if you're like me and just want your old vinyl digitized for minimum cost, this is what you need. I have to do that myself pretty well by hand, using Audacity. It takes you online to a site that claims to have information one can have for a price (see above, "not much money"), and it never, ever got the tracks sorted out correctly. I really can't complain, because it does the one thing I wanted, sending the signal into my computer. I'm a retired teacher, with lots of time and vinyl but not much money, so I bought this turntable to digitize my collection because it was the lowest price I could find. There was a promise from the maker that the software would automatically divide the tracks and take me online to get info about each track, but the "EZ Vinyl Tape Converter" shipped with the unit just isn't capable of such things. Do I care.
As far as archiving, this is a piece of junk. It has a decent built in speaker/headphone jack/and RCA outputs. Also, the program it comes with kind of sucks. I bought this at Guitar Center for $60. Even if you decide to buy this, don't pay more than $75. This is nice for when you want to listen to records somewhere other than where your main stereo set up is.
I would recommend spending a decent amount of money on a heavier turn table and upgrading the sound card on your computer if you care about quality. First of all, the $279 Price Tag can't be right. It's pretty decent for a portable turntable if you want to take something small and light out to the record store to sample some music before you buy. If you really don't care about preserving all the great quality from your vinyl then you won't mind but this thing can't really handle most music.
Some of these records dated to the early 1900's. I used the machine to transfer old 78 records to CD. The machine has input jacks for connecting a tape player to put cassettes onto CD. Very reasonable price. Comes with USB cable and necessary software, which I was not expecting. The results were excellent.
I wouldn't use it to try to entertain a party full of people, as the volume isn't very loud. This portable record player is great to take record stores, listening parties, etc. It's great for what it's intended for.
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