Customer Rating:      Summary: Audio-Solutions has an amazing support person! Comment: I bought this turntable to record LPs to CD and iPod, but I also wanted it to play records. I was not sure if it would connect to the Denon system I had. I sent emails to the online support of both Audio-Solutions and Denon and never heard from Denon. However, Rick at A-S immediately emailed me back twice with extremely detailed instructions. With his help I was able to connect my components together and play a record within minutes! I have not tried the LP-CD, etc features yet, but I am sure if I have any problems, Rick will be just an email away!
Customer Rating:      Summary: Digital Noise Comment: This product seems to insert a high frequency sound on top of the audio recording. While not audible to my ears, it is clearly heard by my wife and makes the recordings unlistenable.
Customer Rating:      Summary: Easy to use, nice product Comment: I had some old 45's that I wanted to convert digitally - works great, recommended!
Customer Rating:      Summary: Happy happy Comment: Works easily and produces what to our ears is great sound. Had some difficulty with heavily scratched records, skipping and not moving on from the track -- but that would be expected with any but the most expensive, recording studio type, of turntables and playing arms.
We did not use the recording software that came with the package.
Customer Rating:      Summary: Not an Audiophile's tool Comment: The Hardware: Given the Audio Technica brand, I was really expecting something a lot better than this package delivers. If you are into music and know a thing or two about audio quality you'll notice immediately the lack of specificity offered in the turntable's specs. That's because it's cheaply made and probably compares miserably with other AT products. Platter is very light, tonearm looks and feels like a joke, non-replaceable/non-removable cartridge (stylus can be replaced, of course), no anti-skating, no tonearm balance control, buttons and other features are cheap... In the end, like with a lot of audio equipment, you get what you pay for, so I guess I shouldn't be so disappointed. Two and a Half Stars... If you believe LPs had little or no quality anyway, this will probably suit your needs - if you saved those albums for reasons related to critical music enjoyment, look elsewhere. Bottom line, it plays LP and 45 records marginally well and it has a dust cover. :-)
The Software: Separate CDs for Mac and PC. These comments pertain to the PC Cakewalk Pyro 5 product (hard to believe this is a "Release 5" maturity product). Cut to the chase - After recording my first album, I spent two hours looking for different software. Goofy installation process. Way short on features; can't seem to label tracks, cannot re-combine tracks that have been split, no internet look-up for LPs (you can do that if you have an original production music CD, but you cannot search, download and associate track info/times/album name/artist/genre, etc. for LPs), cannot listen to the music while recording via USB without headphones or hooking the turntable directly to amplified speakers, track making is cumbersome & there's no automatic track splitting, filters are hard to figure out and seem dysfunctional, recording is a manual process (start the LP, click a "Record" button on the PC screen - manually click "Stop Recording" button, let tonearm pickup. "Good" news there it stops recording automatically after 180 minutes if you forget to hit "Stop Recording"), cannot trust real-time filters (filters have to be "trained" in another manual process), no option to save as *.m4a (iTunes) format, partial help files... Very feature poor. Each side of the LP ends up being its own *.wav file - about 200MB each. If you inadvertantly split a track in the wrong place, there seems to be no way to eliminate the split (which, if it's short, will likely generate errors "Track too short for a CD" and you get to start all over again. "Assembling" the two sides into a single *.wav file takes about 20 minutes on a reasonably beefy PC (XP). I haven't settled on new software yet, but I can assure you, it won't be this junk. Bottom line: The turntable comes with software. Box checked. One Star, less if it were available.
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