Sunset Vette

I spent a lot of time reading about USB turntables because I wanted to be able to “rip” vinyl to my computer to load my iPod. I finally decided that since I already own a regular turntable I should try it first. The only expense would be a few cables and some time, and it would be cheaper than purchasing something new (and having to find somewhere to store it when I’m done). This post will detail some of the experiences with that process.

First, the cables. I need to connect the turntable to my amp, and then connect the amp to the “line in” port on my sound card. My amp is on the top shelf of my office, and the turntable needs to be more accessible. I looked for long patch cables at Walmart. What I found was that the longest audio only patch cables were not very long, but I could get video patch cables that were 12′ in length. I got two of those and just skipped using the video connection. I already had a “Y” adapter that converts the two channels (red and white) to a single input to go into the line-in port on my computer sound card.

One of the posts I saw on amazon.com while reviewing USB turntables was that people could not get rid of an annoying hum in the background. The first album I tried to record had a terrible hum. I was concerned first that the cables were too long, so I tried shorter cables. Since I stacked the turntable on top of the amp in order to do this I went ahead and connected the ground cable from the turntable to the amp, as it should be. No hum. While still in this configuration I replaced the shorter cables with the longer video patch cables. Still no hum. I detached the ground cable, and the hum came back. I didn’t realize how much of a difference it was making until that experiment.

My next thought was that perhaps I could cut the video connecter off of the patch cable and connect the ground to that, which would allow me to put the turntable back down on my desk where I could reach it without standing on my chair. My wife didn’t want me to cut the cable, so that idea was dropped. However, while I was plugging the turntable into my UPS I noticed that the UPS had a ground screw. Would it work?

It turns out that it worked just fine. So now I have my turntable connected to my amp with a 12′ patch cable, and another 12′ patch cable back down to my computer via a Y adapter and into my line-in port, and the ground connection on the turntable is connected to the ground screw on my UPS. An audio purist would scoff at this arrangement, as each cable connection is a potential source for noise, but I am not trying to preserve the audio from my albums for posterity, I just want to be able to convert it to MP3 files to load on my iPod. This is going to be good enough.

Next post I will talk about the software I’m using and the basic process. So far I’ve been reasonably happy with it.