Terratec PhonoPreAmp iVinyl review

As anyone with old and treasured vinyl records knows, the wholesale move to digital music hasn't been without its casualties.

Not all pre-CD recordings ever made it to laser-based format, let alone MP3 or AAC. But help is at hand: Terratec's PhonoPreAmp iVinyl is designed to help turn those recordings into digital versions ready for your iTunes library and iPod.

The PhonoPreAmp iVinyl is a phono input preamplifier for taking input from record players and passing it through to your Mac. The small box follows the Mac mini school of design: a rectangular shape with silver aluminium sides and a white top. It has stereo RCA phono sockets on the back, alongside an earth connector (required by some turntables) and a USB socket. Hook up your turntable with its phono cable and connect the iVinyl to a powered USB port, set the appropriate capacity (100, 250 or 400) and input level (min, max, or line-level for tape and other input), and you're ready. This is as far as the iVinyl hardware goes on its own. From here, the rest of the work is done by the bundled Roxio CD Spin Doctor software.

The software's recording quality defaults to 96kHz at 24 bits per stereo channel. This is rather more than CD audio's 44.1kHz 16-bit quality, but it helps provide a huge amount of detail, which is particularly useful when applying filters such as the de-click, de-crackle and de-hiss sliders. These did a thoroughly impressive job of cleaning up the sound from records that had been less than lovingly handled in their lives. Setting the sliders too high will hurt the regular audio, but there's a sweet spot that turns most vinyl audio back to pristine condition. Once recorded, you define tracks by clicking and dragging across the waveform. These can be named and reordered in a scrolling list, and finally passed along to iTunes which converts them automatically into AAC, MP3 or Apple Lossless, or to Toast for burning directly to disc.

The biggest problem we had with CD Spin Doctor was with the Play Input Through Speakers feature. This was supposed to play through the Mac's audio output what the iVinyl device was passing to the Mac. It did indeed play something, but it was a very quiet and thoroughly garbled version of what we expected to hear. Fortunately, the audio that was being recorded was perfect, so we just used the software's input meters as a guide and recorded one complete record side at a time. It also showed occasional instability, unexpectedly quitting after a number of tracks had been defined. When relaunched, however, it opened the recording temp file with no fuss.

If you have records that you can't find in digital form, or you can't afford to re-buy all your music on CD or as downloads, Terratec's PhonoPreAmp iVinyl teamed with the bundled CD Spin Doctor does the business. Just remember that you have to record in real time: a dozen albums could take a few hours to work through.