I have never owned a vinyl record. My first albums were cassette tapes, and I wasn't very old before I was purchasing my music on CD. My parents, though, have stoutly maintained their record collections, and I've always thought it'd be nice to fold them into my carefully maintained iTunes library.

That's why my ears perked up when I heard about Ion's iTTUSB, which the company is pitching as a solution for ripping your Beatles-era music. Ion Audio is a new brand from veteran audio manufacturer Numark, so they already know how to make a good record player.

The iTTUSB comes intelligently packaged with all the components and cables you need to set up. But (as I quickly learned) records and record players require real TLC. The player needs to be isolated from vibration. Drive belts can get twisted. The stylus arm needs to be balanced just so. Needles can break. Records need to be wiped clear of dust before each use.

There's only so much a manufacturer can do to alleviate these issues, and Ion deals with them all quite nicely. The player's feet are spring-loaded to provide some vibration relief. (Vigorously tapping the table or stomping on the floor is still likely to make your records skip.) The drive belt comes pre-positioned on the platter. The counter-weight for the stylus is pretty easy to install and calibrate. (I still managed to put it on incorrectly the first time.) The needle cartridge is easy to install. All in all, Ion does a good job of leading analog-stupid types like myself through the process.

Now we get to the fun part: playing your music. The iTTUSB has RCA outputs, which can play directly into powered speakers or a conventional stereo system, but it gets its name from its USB output, which will run straight into your Mac. Clean off a record (I found a lint brush and a can of compressed air did the job nicely), get it playing, and you're ready to record. The iTTUSB includes the free recording application Audacity, which captures the record's audio, let's you split it into tracks, and exports the whole mess as a handful of MP3s (or WAVs). Incidentally, I preferred using Rogue Ameoba's Audio Hijack Pro and Fission, which come in a bundle for $50.

There's just one complaint I have that Ion might have addressed. It's frustrating to have to work so hard naming files each time you play in another album, making sure each song gets the proper song title, artist, genre, and date tags, importing them into iTunes, and making sure the album art downloads properly. A fairly simple application could have made the LP-to-MP3 transition much less point-and-click intensive.

Clearly, the biggest single issue with the TTUSB is that it's still, well, a record player. That means it's mechanically finicky. It can't import your albums without playing them through. It can't divide up your songs automatically, and it can't import album info and track names. That's right, folks -- a vinyl record is (surprise!) not a digital format. So don't expect to swipe your (or your parent's) record collection over to a computer in an afternoon, or even a weekend. If digitizing your LPs is something you're wanting to do, plan to make it an ongoing project.

The Bottom Line
The good news is that if you've got a record collection and you're not facing a deadline for getting it on your iPod, the iTTUSB is a great product. It's a solidly-built turn table that's as happy piping tunes to your Mac as it is playing them through your stereo. If you've been looking for a digital-era solution for playing your LP collection, the iTTUSB is for you. Since Ion bills the TTUSB as a way to digitize your record collection, though, we have to ding them with a 3/5, rather than a 4/5, in the final scoring.