Some times you want to listen to something that just didn't have wide enough appeal to make the leap to CD in the 80's, and hasn't made it from the dusty bins of the publisher's vaults to join the back catalog of media on iTunes. That was the case for me with an old recording of J.R.R. Tolkien reading selections from "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" and other poems that are part of the Middle Earth cannon. The Album was recorded in 1967 and is titled "Poems and Songs of Middle Earth". It includes among other things the only published recording of Tolkien reciting poetry in Elvish. Yes, it is geeky but then so am I.

To record it I pulled out the Numark TTUSB Turntable with USB and went to work. The turntable is a wonderful made, belt driven, Hi-Fi turntable that has remarkable quality. The platform is cast alluminum, and everything is top quality here. Included in the box is a disc with both Mac and PC versions of the software to make recording super simple. You just hit record on the computer, hit play on the turntable, and the software records the contents of your album. It will seperate the tracks, and then ask you to identify the album. Once the naming process is complete the software adds the recordings to iTunes automaticaly and then asks if you want to record anything else.

High quality, great sound, and super simple. It doesn't get any better than this. Now if I can just find a way to avoid having to record all of my wife's old Wham! records......