Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Overall I'm fairly satisfied with this turntable. It has a nice strong motor, a decent solid metal platter, and an okay factory cartridge. I say Okay because AT makes much better cartridges (like the AT95 series, that are still fairly inexpensive) than the one that comes on this thing and for this kind of spend, it wouldn't have killed them to throw one in. Plus the included cartridge tracks at "3-5" grams. That's a viciously high tracking force. I have an AT95HE that I mangled the needle on...once I replace the needle, I plan to swap it in. Hey, at least it really includes a magnetic cartridge and not the typical crap ceramic cartridge that the vast majority of these USB turntables come with, and at least it's a standard mount so you can swap it for something better, which you also can't do on most of those crappy tables. This is one of the few USB turntables out there that actually let you adjust tracking force and antiskate at all. One other nice feature is that the table plays 78's, though you'd probably want to get a needle that was better optimized for them. The turntable is easy to set up and operate. Some assembly and tonearm calibration is required, but the instructions are crystal clear. The controls are easy to use. It sounds really good through my amp and that's how I mostly use it. One major complaint, however, is that the audio cable is both too short and not removable/replaceable. I was able to kluge it longer by stringing together all the included adapters and use another RCA cable I had lying around, but that's not very satisfying as a long term solution. I've had some issues with the USB recording as well. For reasons that no one can seem to explain the thing sends a very low amplitude recording out the back end of the A/D. I've got the input level cranked all the way up in Audacity and it still comes out very quiet. There don't seem to be any means of adjusting the amplitude. This limits the ability to make a high quality recording on a computer. The alternative, running the audio signal through the audio input on a sound card works great, if you use the line out level option on the table, but for someone looking to do it through USB this seems to be a problem.