The times they are a changin'
 

Three years ago I bought a cheap phono preamp at Best Buy so that I could connect up my turntable to my pc for digitizing all my vinyl. Recently, the dog decided that the power input cord looked tasty and chewed it up.

Well it turns out that none of the local electronics places carry them anymore. What's more, a lot of the newer amps/receivers don't have them onboard. I finally found one at a music store that sells stuff for DJs. I think vinyl has acheived historical artifact status.

Under optimal conditions, it's still the best format there is. No approximation of the waveform.

Why not just replace the power cord?

I actually had a technochange moment last night. When I first started recording, my partner and I did so on an 8-track Ampex 1" reel to reel analogue deck. Not too long after, we used a Tascam 4-track cassette toy. That was cool, so we moved up to a Tascam 488 8-track cassette multitracker. We did a couple of demos and started an album on that, but then home digital dedicated decks came along, so it was a VS 880. Now, and again in the middle of a project, we're migrating from the VS 880 to computer-based recording (more tracks, lots of nifty processing options, wave editing, stuff you can't do easily or at all on the 880).

It struck me as funny that we'd changed technology five times and we're still trying to get some songs recorded that were written before the first analogue sessions...

Elspode, that made me laugh. It reminds me of being a teenager...

...I was a loner in high school and I wanted to make music, so instead of getting some friends together to play, I utilized this silly karaoke machine my dad had and recorded myself playing guitar over myself singing over myself playing the flute, all designed around bad poetry. I was a one-girl band. Now, I go back to those songs on cassette and think of how much better I could have made it sound on my laptop.

I did a search on the net for the output levels and didn't come up with anything. I didn't go any further than that because the first one wasn't all that good to begin with. If I hadn't found an easy source of replacement, I'd have tried harder.

I'm actually giving some thought to just trying to repair the cord and using an extension cord to make up for the lost length. I'm not that good with a soldering iron, but I may give it a shot. Anyone know if that's likely to introduce hum?

eBay is your friend here
 

Heya,

My wife has one of these. $10 on eBay and we can listen to all her old opera vinyl.

That's all I did.

Mitch