Hal the audio fanatic

Into Vinyl? The Best Turntables Under $400 (Switched)

Nov 15th 2010 10:14PM Sorry to burst the bubble of the writers of this piece, but it's NOT possible to just plug in a turntable into the input of a sound card since (unless there's some rather slick software on board like the RIAA equalization curve in Audacity) the resulting sound will be very tinny sounding. All records are recorded using the RIAA response curve, which boosts the highs and damps down the lows on the original recording according to a very fixed curve.
All playback equipment that can deal with Turntable in put has a reverse of the RIAA response curve to damp down the highs and boost the lows, thus returning the signal to produce a nominally flat reproduction of what went down in the studio. This is done (somewhat like Dolby) to allow for a really strong high-frequency-rich recording to be then reduced (along with dust noise and scratches) to a manageable level, and boosting up the under-recorded bass end (where the ear is much less able to distingish surface noises). It also stopped the playback needle from jumping out of the groove where low frequencies in the recording would have caused the needle excessive travel.

It would have been important to include this little fact in the article. Those USB-connected turntables already do this, as do those that can be plugged straight into a line-level input (like tape play or aux) on a receiver.