Bob

Surprisingly, there are a lot of turntables on the market at present, if not in the department stores. Turntables are still big in the disco world, and any store supplying sound equipment into the professional disco market will carry a range. In Australia, Pro Audio in Canberra (the biggest Australian mail order company in the sound equipment market) has a range of middle range turntables and cartridges. Price range $600 - $1200 Australian. You can still buy my Technics 1200SL Mk2 - identical in appearance as my 20 year old model. Stanton is another big name. These are direct drive turntables with low noise, good speed control, and solid construction.

You want a reasonable magnetic cartridge - still a good range. The Stanton 500 series is popular in disco circles because of good sound and robust construction. I use one for poor records, tracking at about 3 grams, which minimises noise. They are less than A$100. I use an Ortophon MC1 for good records tracking at about 1.5 gm.

Do a search on Google and you will find $40,000 belt drive turntables if you want!! You need a truck to carry these around.

Tandy's el cheapo has poor noise (rumble) characteristics, and poor speed control (wow and flutter). It could even have a piezo cartridge, which doesn't need a pre-amp. If your record is anything like listenable you will hate the resulting CD.

The program Wave Repair I mentioned can automatically break tracks up, but it is easy to do it manually, and more accurate. The problem is that some records have a lot of background noise, which the program does not recognise as a break. If you raise the threshhold noise level, it may find breaks in quiet passages of the music. This problem is common to all similar software.

I use 768Mb of RAM, so can easily display and edit a 300Mb sound file. Memory is cheap. Display the file and you can see the breaks. Highlight a few seconds each side, listen and confirm that it is a break, then mark it by hitting the space bar. When you are finished, tell the program to break the file up at the marked breaks.

My old 500MHz PC took ages to do any processing, but I saved up for a 2.4GHz machine, which is pretty good at processing. Funny, we once wanted fast PCs for crunching spreadsheets!

Regards
Chris