A/V Devices

The Ion Audio ITTUSB turntable let’s your mom and dad’s old vinyl albums to your PC and hear what they were groovin’ to during the Summer of Love. Now sure, this unit has been around for awhile, but Ion has turned things up to eleven with some very notable improvements. First off, they’ve added two additional models which bypass the PC altogether and allow users to rip directly to either their iPod or burn straight to CD. That’s an awesome feature that’ll make it easy as pie for the convenience oriented consumer just lookin’ to preserve their old favorites without having to shell out an additional $20 for CD or $10 for downloads.

Those who don’t mind the nostalgia that comes with the cracks and pops of playing the album while capturing can look to the LP Dock or the LP 2 CD models for convenient digital transfer. However, those audio obsessed who wish to clean up the recording and play “sound engineer” can simply get the ITTUSB model and capture the album all at once using the included open source software called Audacity. Audacity does take some getting used to, however, and is not for the weak of heart. It’s open source development make it free to use (you can download it on the Internet), but the learning curve may be steep for the “blinking VCR crowd.” Still, the journey will be worth taking and your patience will be rewarded as you learn to clean up those old albums and restore them to practically new but in a more updated digital format.

Thankfully, Ion also includes some notable utilities that can make the process more automatic and streamlined. EZ Vinyl Converter 2 for PC (EZVC2) and EZ Audio Converter for Mac (EZAC); the best way to record and convert vinyl directly to iTunes. EZVC2 features Gracenote® MusicID technology, which analyzes your vinyl and automatically retrieves album, artist and song information for you. EZAC also lets you easily enter track information.

The Ion Turntables are completely plug and play and you can pick up a refurbished model for under $100. The LP Dock and the LP2CD models, however, will run you a bit more, around $250 for the iPod model and $400 for the LP2CD (which isn’t bad considering it has a CD burner built in).

Is it easy to use? Absolutely. Especially the LPDock and LP2CD which will rip and record directly to digital with no worries of connection or humming issues. And when you consider the cost of replacing all those LP3 to CD or even MP3 download, the investment is more than worth it. And considering that many classic albums (like those recorded in 78 RPM) simply aren’t available in a more current format (like those Japanese bootlegs you have hidden), the ability to rip those old albums to mp3 become even more important.

Consider investing in these, and it’s sister product the Tape2PC – which will rip cassettes to mp3 tracks as well.

Too bad there isn’t an 8Track2PC available. I’ve got hundreds of cartridges just waiting to be digitized!

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If there’s one tech company that completely “gets” the whole fair use thing, it’s Ion Audio. First they came out with the ITTUSB turntable which allows users to rip old vinyl albums (what are those?) to mp3 and now they have done with same thing for cassette tapes thanks to Tape 2 PC.

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The Panasonic SDR-SW20 may be compact. And with the ability to record straight to SD cards, it may be even easier to use. But one thing is isn’t, is a quality camcorder experience. In fact, it’s downright average.
What’s really a shame is that while the SDR-SW20 incorporates cool features like Dolby stereo and wide angle video, the quality of the image is so blah that one walks away feeling like those features are wasted. That instead of getting a better experience, you end up with simply more average. More “gray.”

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The Blik Wi-Fi radio uses the Internet to receive a bucket load of different radio channels from anywhere in the world, at last count there was 11,443 different channels so no matter how diverse your taste there should be something of interest. Along with Internet radio it can also receive the more traditional FM and play any music stored and shared on your media server.

Setting up the blik internet radio is easy but a bit fiddly, if your Wi-Fi network uses WEP encryption (please say it does) you’ll need to enter you hash key by using the left and right keys to scroll between numbers, symbols, upper and lower case letters (a bit like entering your initials on the high score table of an old arcade machine). This does take a bit of patience but fortunately is a once only action (it remembers your entered WEP key between power cuts).

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Camera accessories are invaluable. And when you’re vacationing, they can be fairly vital. If users are hard core travelers who takes tons of pictures, it really helps to remember when and, more importantly where those pictures were taken. Enter the Gisteq PhotoTrackr, which is a pocket size GPS device which can synch with pictures taken and map them onto Flickr and Google maps.

Here’s how it works.

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I’ll admit to being skeptical about the whole portable video concept. It’s a matter of fitting it into my life – music I can listen to pretty much anywhere, but to make use of portable video you have to be not driving, cycling, walking down the street, or operating any machinery. Which pretty much rules out most of my days!

Having just said that I spent last week commuting via train which left me with long gaps in the day to fill, so I got to spend some quality time with the MyVu personal media viewer. Follow the jump to find out how I got on…

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