ION Audio iPTUSB Portable USB Turntable with Software and Built-in Speaker

This unit is much more compact than I expected. It stores and unpacks quickly and is easy to use and understand. I am recording to MP3 all my vinal and Cassetts and this has made the job MUCH easier. You will not be dissappointed.

Fluttery uneven speed is a fatal flaw.

If you listen to music without any perfectly "constant tones", like rap (with no melody), there's nothing wrong with this turntable.

Otherwise, especially when you hear a piano or an orchestra, I'm annoyed by the flutter in the speed - a rapid repeating speedup-and-slowdown, real fast, maybe 10 times a second, that makes the music "flutter", like when you talk to yourself in front of the spinning blades of a fan. Subtle, but it's DEFINITELY there, and very annoying.

I get around this problem by putting a MASSIVE thick 12-inch clay Victrola record from the 1920's on the turntable, underneath the record I'm playing. That acts as a "flywheel" to add weight and mass to the turntable, and even out the speed, eliminating the flutter. You can stack a couple heavier-weight LPs under your record. (Or, if you're using this to play Victrola records - problem solved right there.)

Then the turntable sounds OK.

But when I turn up the volume, on the loud parts, the amp tries to drive itself harder than it's capable of, and "sucks power" away from the turntable motor, and the speed slows down in the loud parts of the music. That REALLY SUCKS when the orchestra swells then the pitch goes flat.

So, if you DON'T PLAY IT LOUD (connect it to an external amp if you want it loud, don't try to use the internal speaker), and you PUT A COUPLE HEAVY RECORDS ON THE TURNTABLE underneath the one you're playing to even out the flutter, it's fine.

This was an experiment in human nature. I wanted to transfer my old LPs so badly that I thought this might be worth a chance. Well it turned out to be so bad on so many levels that now I'm embarrassed. Mainly the sound quality is, maybe, 8-bit resolution - if that. It did, however, monitor ambient sounds like - aircraft flying over - while I tried to transcribe a test transfer to a file. At least the file creation did occur. If you want to take it off my hands, and pay my costs (54.99USD + shipping costs to you) - make a comment on this review. I have to admit, Woot did warn me.

Save yourself some anguish and avoid buying this. Ours never worked from day one. Thinking we had not hooked up something, we asked a techie friend for help. He concluded the problem was in the turntable. We had thrown away the box so we learned an expensive lesson NEVER to buy electronics on the Internet--unless you are an electronics repairman.

I haven't heard anything this bad since my Close N Play. Maybe their upscale turntables are better, but this portable one really has a problem with speed variations.The addition of a pitch control knob marked +10% is silly when the pitch is floating around alot more than that.