Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Smart shopping

Enclosed with my weekly copy of the Radio Times this week, the usual useless shopping flyers. You know the ones - they always fall out all over the floor when you pick the magazine up from a shop rack, or you can't find the magazine you want because the rack is stuffed with thousands of the blighters that other people have extracted and left behind.

But being a gadget guy my attention was caught this week by a picture of a turntable with a built-in CD burner. Under the heading "Smart shopping" the leaflet exhorted owners of vinyl to transfer their records to CD without a PC using this clever device. Or you can use the USB cable supplied to record your vinyl direct to PC (possibly using the scratch-and-pop cleaning software supplied).

The price of this glorious technology? £349.95.

Smart shopping indeed, when you can pick up digitally remastered copies of vinyl classics at any branch of HMV or Virgin Records for between £5 and £10. So you'll need to have more than 50 albums in your collection - that you want to keep! - before this makes financial sense, and even then your recording won't be as good as the professionally remastered version.

Wonder if they'll sell many...?

1 comment:

Tvor said...

I know! One place here has a usb vcr so you can plug it in and transfer your tapes to digital. Yes, for about $250. But another has a little device that goes in between the vcr and the computer and i got that on sale for about 80$. Since a lot of the tapes i had were television shows, it's more difficult to find a downloadable version and it was worth it to be able to preserve some old home moves that my grandmother took that had been transfered to video tape. AFter i'm done with it, G. can borrow it and he'll have all his vhs collection to convert, because my vcr can't play his tapes.