Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I am attempting to copy some of my old vinyl to CD through my pc. I have the turntable, preamp, cables & software. The problem is that when I connect the turntable to the PC through the preamp I can hear the track playing but it is very badly distorted and therefore unrecordable. I haven't eathed the turntable yet as the distortion dosen't sound like 'mains hum'. I am trying to find my old garrard turntable to see if that makes any difference, but they might take me three days of hunting in the loft.

Try this it's the easiest way I could find.

USB Turntable iTT 05 XL > Maplin

:iagree: Bought one for my dad a few years back for Christmas. Works really well.

By preamp, I presume you mean a phono amp to bring phono levels up to a line level.

If that's the case, as you sure you're using the line input on the sound card and not the mic input? The levels of mic inputs on soundcards tend to be lower and therefore are more amplified internally. So maybe you have "double" amplification between the phono preamp and the mic preamp in the soundcard. If it's a relatively recent sound card, the mic input is pink in colour.

I have plugged it into the blue socket. However when you plug in a device a drop down menu appears asking you what device yiou have plugged in, so if you plug into the pink mic socket and select line in, it reassigns the socket as line in.

Do a search on Project PHONOBOX II USB. I've been using one for about 9 months now, and it's truly painless. Anything else compromises the source (I'm using a Michell Gyro SE) and the source is everything.

If you're used to hearing your vinyl played back from a decent turntable setup then using one of those Maplins turntable abortions will drive you mad when you can't hear half the detail on your records.

And do please remember to use a decent sampling rate and make full-size WMA files that you can take down to MP3 quality later. You only want to do the Analogue to Digital conversion once, so do it right the first time!

have you thought about downloading them instead with the likes of itunes and other download services?

It all depends on the quality you wan't to get. I've turned a few vinyls into MP3 for listening in my car - and I assure you that in a Felicia with a standard radio/cd, perfect recording quality is not worth to strive for

I also have an old turntable and an old preamp connected to the "music port" 3.5 mm jack on my compact stereo in the bookshelf. I then simply put a cable between the earphone jack on the stereo and the microphone jack on my computer. Software Audacity. Works good enough for me, only snag is that I can't hear anything while recording. Could be worth testing before buying another turntable.