Suggestions for a Vinyl/CD/Tape/iPod combo

thegreengoblin

After devoting most of my time to getting a family going in recent years, I now have a bit more time to devote to my music collection...a system reboot if you will!

I want to replace my old stereo system with something a bit more up to date. I have a fairly large vinyl, CD and tape collection and I'd like to get everything onto digital files. Ialso download quite a bit of stuff. I know there are units which can convert your old records and tapes into files but do any of these come with mp3 player docks?

I have a turntable but I need a new CD/tape deck unit so am I better off buying separates or are there any serious units which can do it all for me in one go? Any ideas or suggestions much appreciated.

Ant

Well done on getting the family going. I hope one of them shares your love of music.

I'd definitely recommend separate systems for your tape and CD. I spent about £100 on both decks about 10 years ago and both served me well. I still use the CD deck but the tape system doesn't get used any more as the quality isn't very good since most of my cassette collection has been listened to many times and there's always some tape hiss (even with Dolby noise reduction). If the album is a good one, I'll replace it with CD or digital download.

If you like decent sound quality, I'd also recommend you stay away from the USB turntables as most of them are built from poor quality components. Since you already, have a turntable that you're happy with, just connect it to a good phono pre-amp.

I haven't yet done this myself as I'm still looking into getting a good turntable and cartridge but if you're digitising, you'd also need a good quality sound card which isn't integrated with the motherboard - as otherwise you'll get noise from the surrounding circuitry. (If you use a laptop, you'll need to an external (USB) soundcard). For software, just use the Free open source software, Audacity and encode as FLAC (loss-less encoding that takes up roughly half the disk space as uncompressed audio). You'll find that some people digitise using 24 bits per sample at a rate of 96kHz but this is overkill and 16bits/44kHz is all you need to capture the musical information stored on an LP.

Finally, over the last year, I purchased two Squeezebox devices (Boom and Classic) which I find to be a great way to listen to digital music files. However, the best new addition to my music system was getting a great pair of floor-stander speakers which have a full frequency range and can easily be placed in the optimal position for stero listening. With good speakers, it's a pure joy to listen to a piece of music and each time I listen to an album with these speakers, it's like listening to it for the first time.

thegreengoblin

Thanks for the reply. I still haven't got round to deciding what to do but that's more cos I haven't had the money recently! But your suggestions were very useful so thanks again.

teekayd25

Hey folks, decided to revive this rather than create a new one

Interested in a vinyl / CD / ipod dock combo system myself.

Maybe something like a combination of the two products below . . .

http://www.amazon.co.uk/ION-iPROFILE-Turntable-cradle-piano/dp/B002OHE4RM/ref=sr_1_5?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1299888877&sr=1-5

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Teac-LPR500-Turntable-CD-Cassette/dp/B003JNVM9S/ref=sr_1_6?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1299888877&sr=1-6

Has anyone seen anything of this ilk, or are these device just not in existence yet?