GadgetCrowd

Tech Digest: The digital music revolution seems to have affected all age-groups – with your nan being as likely to listen to her iPod while she’s gardening as your annoying nephew is to be rocking his Walkman ‘phone at the back of the ‘bus. A problem that perhaps affects the older MP3 enthusiast a little more keenly than the young is the difficulty of transferring old, beloved and often irreplaceable vinyl disks into the new digital formats. Sooner or later though, almost everyone wants to convert a little bit of history. A few solutions have been floated in the past, Steinberg’s Clean was one particularly worthy contender, but all the products hitherto available have been a bit..how shall I put this?…fiddly. A Californian outfit called Ion has spotted this evident need for a simple piece of kit which makes the vinyl-to-digital transfer as painless as possible and launched the first (as far as they know) USB turntable. We reported the product launch at the end of last year but it’s only recently that we were able to snag one for review.