After years of garage sales, I have amassed a trea- A well-spent garage sale quarter will buy an sure trove of scratchy 78 RPM records on obscure entire album of Dinah Washington, Three Dog regional labels by even more obscure artists. Most Night, or Devo. will never make it to a commercial CD, as the market Of course, there are significant downsides to is restricted to a few like-minded kooks that don’t like vinyl records. The endless flipping of the album, the to leave the house. And the old-timey stuff that has steady sound degradation with every play, and the made it onto CD has been scrubbed and optimized space required for record collections are all legend-to remove the pops, skips, scratches, and other ary. So, with the ever-present bar napkin, I started auditory foibles. designing my dream machine. It had to be able
But what if you like those defects? Aren’t those to digitize any input — mono or stereo. It should pops and scratches part of the fun of listening to have a radio, preferably with time-shift recording an original pressing of Duke Ellington’s “Mood In- like a TiVo, should sync to my iPod, have a decent digo”? And Soft Cell’s “Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret” or turntable, and a big hard drive. And it shouldn’t be AC/DC’s “For Those About to Rock” sounds exactly embarrassingly ugly. as you remembered when you hear it in the correct You can rest assured that you won’t get mugged order with the scratchy pauses between tracks. A carrying this behemoth on a subway — build the whole 99 cents for a single i Tunes track? Forget it! world’s biggest MP3 player!
Telefunken! Or an old sewing machine table! Or a round-top refrigerator!
1. Nearly any old Panasonic, Fisher, or Marantz tuner
would be great as long as it has a turntable input.
My good friend Damon turned me on to the 1970s
Sansui tuners. Pretty expensive back in the day, 4. I used the KOGI L4AX 14" LCD. It was the cheapest
this $10 garage sale Sansui is a reasonably modern, flat screen that CompUSA was selling four years ago.
solid-state design with lots of inputs, and it works I paid about $200.
perfectly. Plus, it’s loud as hell.
5. Nearly a perfect embedded computer, the Mac mini
2. A replacement needle and cartridge will cost more is compact and discreet. A cheaper donor Mac would than your excellent garage sale turntable score, so be just dandy, too. make sure the needle looks decent before you buy!
6. Griffin gadgets are just input/output devices. But
3. Aesthetically, the $15 Farnsworth is beyond they are quite elegant and provide the necessary reproach. The turntable was gone, but they were interface to get the technology to do what you want: generally monaural so it’s better to replace it anyway. AirClick — Wireless Remote Control
The commanding size of the Farnsworth means there iMic — Line Level Input to USB Converter is ample interior space for all the stuff to be jammed RadioShark — Radio Tuner with Time Shift Recording inside. Can’t find a Farnsworth? Find a Philco or a Power Mate — Programmable Anything Knob
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