Monday Review: AKAI Pro USB Turntable

This week, forum goer Andy [Andytlr] amazes us all with sentences and punctuation, concerning entertainment of the USB kind.

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This turntable is a little all-rounder. It plays the common 33's and 45's, but it also plays the much rarer 78's. It also had a reverse feature so you can listen to satanic messages as often as you'd like.



I thought it would be a piece of piss to setup, you just put the head shell and the counter weight on the tone arm and the platter on the body. Unfortunately the platter wasn't spinning and I sat there for about five minutes trying to work out why.

Every time a geek has to consult a manual, a little bit of them dies. But it wasn't working. So I looked in the box and found an inkjet printed, stapled together manual. Nice guys, did you learn that in presentation school? It would have been better to make me read the PDF on the included CD.

Turns out this is a belt driven turntable, and you need to connect the 'belt' to the motor. I use the term 'belt' loosely, it's actually a big rubber band.

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The Akai website suggests that this can be used for DJing, or more specifically "DJ Performances". But, being belt driven, not direct drive, I don't suggest it. They have included a slip mat but the pickup speed isn't great, there is no pitch control and you certainly don't want to put too much strain on the 'rubber band'. Your wiki wiki's and your f-f-f-fresh's aren't going to work properly here.

The included cartridge (needle) is fine. But you can install another one if you'd like. The manual says that the cartridge has been pre-mounted in a 'universal head shell'. But I tried connecting a head shell from a Technics 1200 (the most popular turntable, ever) to the tone arm and it didn't fit. So if you want to install a new cartridge, you're going to need to get some little screw drivers out.

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If you're thinking "who buys Akai stuff anymore, that walkman ripoff I had in the 80's was pretty cool but I haven't really heard of them since". Akai have an excellent range of music production equipment like MIDI controllers and the revered MPC. Which, I can pretty safely say, is the foundation of most hip hop.

That being said, recording samples directly into the MPC isn't the easiest process. So one of the big attractions of this turntable is the ability to record lossless samples straight to the computer for chopping up.

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Akai make two models of USB turntable, the ATT023U and the ATT022U. ATT023U has a very cool feature that lets you record directly to any FAT32 formatted SD card or USB drive. Unfortunately it's half baked. I don't know what kind of encoder is built into it, but it's LAME (pun intended). It encodes directly to 128kbps Mp3, with no option to up the bitrate or select a lossless format. This blows. You have a record collection because you're a music nerd not because you don't give a shit how your music sounds coming out of your Dell laptop speakers. Save your money kids, get ATT022U because they can both plug directly into your computer via a USB cable.

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This is where it becomes the most awesome thing you ever purchased. With a normal turntable the process for recording is to plug the turntable into a mixer, the mixer into an amp, and the amp into a computer. With composite cables at every step. The chance for a loss of quality is large. But not here. Audacity (included, but free software) can read the audio directly through the USB port and the quality is perfect. You just hit record in Audacity, press start on the turntable and listen to your song. When it's finished you hit stop in Audacity and trim the start and end of your recording.

With Audacity you can then export to whatever format you like. It uses the LAME mp3 encoder (the real one, not the metaphorical one built into the hardware) to export to mp3. But if you prefer to do your encoding with iTunes you can export as WAV or Apple Lossless.

I found that the 'recording volume' or gain wasn't loud enough for most records. This is easily fixed with 'Amplify' in Audacity. But it isn't ideal and the actual hardware really should be able to make it louder. This is just another reason why the direct recording ATT023U isn't worth it. Even if you could time the start and end of your recordings perfectly, most of them wouldn't be loud enough. You're always going to need to edit that recording, so why not do it straight to the computer in the first place.

Obviously you're going to want to hear how the recordings sound. But, as TISM once said, "you're only one download from this song's copyright". So I've cut sections of songs from various genres into one track so you can get the idea.

http://is.gd/1dP0x (Note: I've uploaded it to my blog because Tumblr have an embedded audio player)

I thought I would want to record every record I've ever bought, but in reality I had already acquired digital versions of the records I love. What it has done is made me less hesitant about buying new records. I know that on first listen I can have it on my computer and therefore on the go as well. And that's what this turntable's about, it bridges the gap between analogue and digital and it does it very, very well. I've been given a review unit for a month and I intend on keeping it for every day of that month.

For the ratings, I'm going to pretend that I also had the model without direct recording because I'm told it's exactly the same apart from that feature.

<strong>ATT023U gets 4/10.</strong> The direct recording absolutely sucks.
<strong>ATT022U gets 8/10</strong>. It's awesome and I want to keep it. It'd be perfect if it had pitch control, better gain and was direct drive.

That's it for this week kids.

Thanks again to Andy!

If you'd like your product reviewed, then get in contact!
pete.dillon@mactalk.com.au