If you have reached a certain level of "maturity," you probably have boxes in the basement filled with artifacts known as vinyl records.
We played these dinosaurs of the analog age on gadgets called turntables, and if we played them enough times - or spilled enough beer on them - they developed that combination of crackles, pops and distortion that teary-eyed audio tweaks like to call the "warmth of vinyl."
Many adults persist in keeping these long after the only turntable that could play them has crumbled into dust. More than a decade into the age of do-it-yourself digital audio, I still get regular e-mail from folks who want to know how convert their vinyl to CDs or music files for their computers and iPods.
My longtime advice stands: If you like a vinyl album enough and it exists on CD, buy it or download it from iTunes, Amazon or Rhapsody. At best, converting vinyl is a pain in the neck, and those converted tracks sound pretty rough by today's standards.
Those who persist, read on, because I've found a gadget that makes conversion a lot easier than it used to be - as long as you're willing to invest the money, time and patience.
The $249 Ion LPDock is a turntable designed to turn vinyl album tracks into digital music files and even play them right into your iPod - though the latter is more of a parlor trick than useful feature, for reasons I'll discuss later.
Ion has been selling conversion turntables for several years (it also makes a cassette tape converter), but this is by far the most sophisticated model I've seen.
At first glance, the LPDock looks like a normal turntable with extra-large controls (undoubtedly to accommodate the mature adults who own all the vinyl).
LPDock also has a row of buttons with functions that analog turntable designers never dreamed about. And yes, there's a dock on one edge for an iPod.
In addition to standard audio output cables with RCA jacks - for compatibility with traditional audio receivers and amplifiers - the LPDock has a USB cable that plugs directly into your computer.
This direct digital connection sidesteps a long-standing problem with the traditional method of hooking a turntable to a PC - plugging the output cables into a PC's sound card. Most turntables don't put out a strong enough signal when they're hooked up that way. The direct USB connection and some internal processing handled by the Ion make a big difference in quality.
