ION TTUSB10 USB Turntable Review

USB turntables are a bit of an odd duck: at their core they're a device that still exists to serve of the pleasure of audiophiles and DJs - two small and elite groups - but they have digital audio converters and USB connections to facilitate conversion of sweet, sexy analog sound into easily portable digital files on your computer. Taking all of that into consideration, it's really a wonder LP lovers don't consider USB turntables the Antichrist.

Actually, that's a little unfair: plenty of people have record collections moldering in boxes in their basements that they've love to listen to again, perhaps on their mp3 players or their media PCs. They're probably looking for a fairly easy solution that sounds good. For these people, Ion Audio has the TTUSB line, including the TTUSB10, a turntable with USB and RCA outputs that hopes to not only play your records, but help you digitize them with style and ease. Today's task: find out exactly how well those claims stand up to the cold, harsh light of reality. Let's go.

It might match your computer better than stereo system, but the TTUSB10 USB turntable looks very sleek.

The TTUSB10 USB turntable comes with all of the parts you'll need to get started: various turntable-related pieces, an adapter so you can play 45 rpm discs, an installation CD with audio recording software and two installation guides. Ion Audio designed the first one, a quick start guide, to get you playing and recording records as soon as possible. The guide is a good start, but Ion Audio could have made the process much simpler by assembling more of the turntable in the factory. Instead, you'll have put together a few parts of the turntable yourself, all while interpreting a complicated assembly process of thirty or so steps, full of technical phrases like "tone arm lock nut," "arm clip" and "anti-skate adjustment" that aren't particularly well explained.

To connect the platter with the drive mechanism inside the turntable, you need to connect that black rubber band around that brass knob.

I understand that turntables are fragile, sensitive things, prone to problems during shipment (or so the quick start guide would have me believe), but Ion Audio could have saved me a few headaches by eliminating two of the following groups of steps from the setup process:

Connecting the turntable platter to the drive mechanism. Currently, there's a rubber band that runs around the inside of the platter (the plastic disc that the record sits on) that can come off during shipping and needs to be hooked onto the drive mechanism (the motor that spins the platter) for the turntable to work. Hooking the rubber band onto the drive is a minor annoyance, but in addition you need to spin the platter around once to make sure the drive mechanism works correctly - something the quick start guide does not take the time explain clearly. Ion Audio should work out some sort of design that involves no connecting and no manual spinning.

That hefty-looking knob on the upper right is the weight that balances the tone arm.

Setting up the tone arm. The tone arm is the part that puts the needle to the record and receives the vibrations from the grooves. It has a counterweight on one end to swing the tone arm back and forth from the record to the resting position without damaging the record. All good so far, until you realize you have to attach the counterweight yourself and spin it until it balances the tone arm. It doesn't sound like a hard concept, but Ion Audio takes four steps to explain it and really, shouldn't they just counterweight the tone arm in the factory instead of making the customer do it themselves? If there's a good reason why this process needs to wait until after you open the box, explaining why in the documentation isn't too much to ask.

Overall, I wasn't very impressed with the TTUSB10's "quick setup," which needs some tweaking from the design department to make it a seamless experience.