How to connect your Computer to your Stereo

We updated our Howto page: "How to connect your Computer to your Stereo"
[Why? I bought a turntable on ebay]

Well, we finally got around to an update of our popular "How to connect your Computer to your Stereo" page. Not a huge update, mainly added some extra info on connecting your Turntable to your computer and added links to some good free software.

It should be getting some further updates pretty soon. Why? Mainly because I just bought a turntable. Yeah, maybe I'm crazy - they are noisy, inconvenient, and can get to be an expensive hobby all in themselves, but I just miss playing records.

What brought all this on? Well, I was browsing around in the used CD store when I just couldn't help but browse through some of those $1 records they had virtually tons of. I kept finding old records I liked until the next thing I knew I was browsing through the $2-$5 sections. I stopped myself before I went crazy, since I gave up on my old Garrard Belt drive turntable years ago and had nothing to play them on.
What is it, nostalgia? I know there is a big vinyl resurgence lately, but I never once was tempted to shell out $25 for Norah Jones latest on 180g vinyl, and $2500 for a turntable. Don't get me wrong, I always enjoy listening to high end audio systems at all the high end audio shows, but give me an sacd, DVD audio or hopefully soon some Blu Ray Audio disks - nice clean digital audio on click and pop free disks! Well, I guess I miss the whole reverential process involved that I remember so well from my youth. You find that big 12"x12" square among all your other records, take it out and figure out the tracks you like, clean the disk carefully and set it down on the platter. Then you cue up the arm and move it - just right there - carefully to right over the gap in the tracks and let it slowely drop down... ahhh, I miss that.

No, I'm not one of those that thinks analog just has to sound better. I'll get back to you on that, I guess, since I don't even have a needle yet... Maybe I'm getting old and want to go back to my youth, but then it seems that a big part of the vinyl comeback is amongst the young. Young people were scouring the heck out of those huge bins of LP's. Maybe size matters? I always did miss the SIZE of Records - CD's were more like little toys. You can hardly read the writing. And Digital downloads? Yes, I have my share, but that's even more of a disconnect to having something palpable in your hands - something to sit back on the couch and look at while the record played.

So, while I don't even have the turntable I "won" on ebay - a nice Denon table (the nice Duals were just too high) that was quite nice and a bit expensive in its day, and I have not even ordered a cartridge for it yet, I am definately looking forward to getting it all together and working (supposing it arrives in one piece) .

Yes, I may get bored with the whole thing very quickly, and go back to strictly iPod, CD and my skimpy sacd and dvd audio disk collections for the ease of use, but I may not. Perhaps I'll ride out the recession picking up old $1 records that maybe I never checked out in my youth. Maybe I'll splurge on a few $3 and even $10(!) records that I know I enjoy. In any case it's not going to cost me a fortune to check it out.