Ordered the turntable

I wrote about wanting to digitize all my LP's, and what I was thinking of buying to do it.

When I actually went to order a turntable, I was somewhat surprised to realize that there was a wide gap between what was being marketed to the teenage "let's go over to your mom's basement and listen to some records" market and the audiophile "lets compare these three cartridges with different weighted tone arms" market, with very little in between. And looking at what was in between reminded me very strongly that I've bought two turntables in my life, and both of them are dead.

I realized that I don't need to pay for more hardware that knows how to digitize sound, because I already have soundcards of a sort in all my computers, and a very good, special purpose but quite usable for this application, soundcard in my Zoom H2. (I should tell you about it, but that's another post.)

The item I was expecting to order in the post referenced above includes speakers, which means it would take up too much space on my bookshelves which already have lots of much better speakers on them.

So in the end, I went for a low-end audiophile system. I pored over the needledoctor site, and ended up ordering the Pro-Ject Debut III Turntable in Basic Black. It will be upgradeable if I decide I want to be more audiophile, and probably won't break in quite the same way as my two consumer turntables did. Another connector tax on the new audio system was that I had to buy a preamp. I'll have to spend some more money if I decide I like digitizing vinyl enough to get into 78's, but I won't need more space on my bookshelves.

I'll let you know how much I end up using it.

Related posts:

1. Bought some electronics
2. So I lied…
3. Upgrading a computer