Setting Up

Aha! Just taking a look at the Thorens thinking maybe I'd fiddle with it and try to get it working. I had forgotten about the cartridge, just vaguely remembering I'd gotten a great deal on it. Turns out it's an Ortofon M15E Super from way back when. I'll be trying it out. Also, I may have found that the Thorens wasn't as broken as I thought. After some minor fiddling with the belt it seems to be working. I still need to repair or replace the cable.

When looking at the reviews of the turntable AT-LP120  it was made clear that the ATN2 cartridge was just not good for archival work, or even serious listening. So I added an Audio-Technica AT95E after concluding it provides the most bang for the buck. Apparently I should have read a newer review because Audio-Technica has been shipping them with the 95E for a while. Now I have two, which is fine as they have finite lifetimes.

The gear arrived and setup is a breeze. No sense going into detail, there are youtube videos or you can just read the enclosed directions. I'm going with 1.5g tracking on the cartridge and will save the ADC ZLM for future comparisons when and if I pass the audio through a better pre-amp. I hooked up the usb connector and booted my W7 laptop and ran into problem one: the Audacity CD enclosed was an old version (1.3). The look and feel of the current version (2.0.2, which I had pre-loaded) is really different. It is intuitive however and the only reason it took half an hour was that I had to figure out that turning on "monitor" would be a good idea if I wanted to hear anything while recording. Next entry I'll systematize what I did so the reader will not need to suffer through this.