USB turntable...great, but flawed, idea

While shopping for my daughter’s birthday present at Hot Topics this week, I came across something I absolutely had to have.

The Ion ITTUSB turntable is an idea whose time has definitely come: Direct-to-computer transfer of those old vinyl album tracks from my hundreds of LPs…those albums that are classics, but will never make the commercial jump to CD…what’s not to love? Unfortunately, the idea was better than the execution.

After four hours of frustration yesterday that the computer couldn’t find the turntable, completely reading the instruction manuals and support materials online, at the very end of the FAQs, I came across the note that “oh, yeah, it’s not supported by Windows XP Media Center.” XP Home…yes. XP Pro…uh huh. No Media Center, though. A further look revealed no patches for the problem either…grrrrr!

It’s aggravating, but not an insurmountable problem, though, as we plan to purchase a couple new laptops within the next two months. I’ll have to do a little further looking to see whether the turntable will be compatible with the new Vista OS.

Will post review later…assuming I can find an operating system on which it will run.