This is a concept design by Fujitsu that popped up in Japan at CEATEC. While we don’t usually talk about concepts — they rarely come to fruition — it is important to look at it from a UI standpoint. Laptop makers are just now figuring out that there is a wealth of real estate on the laptop lid and adding little WiFi buttons and other claptrap. However, this media controller/turntable thingy takes that one step further. I’m quite certain 2007 is the year of the weird laptop lid, and you’re seeing it here first. While we’re sure LCDs are going to end up there, what else do you think we’ll see in working models?

Fujitsu Turn Table PC fuses Macbook and iPod [NewLaunches]

<img class="right" src="http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/MP3, which greatly reduces the quantity of gear you have to lug around.

But it's more than just a convergence player. The x2 Hybrid has a vibration fightin' solid-core design, the industry's highest torque direct drive motor, pitch control and the Numark Beatkeeper beat calculator.

The unit has an MSRP of $1500, but it can be had for $1000, which is pretty reasonable considering the features it includes. Couple this with Final Scratch and you would be well on your way to making crappy techno.

Product Page [via Uncrate]

Everyone’s favorite liberal and entertaining talk station, NPR, ran a story this morning on how vinyl is making a comeback. The reason for those Talking Heads 7-inches coming back in style? NPR cites the popularity of the low-cost USB turntable and the total lack of DRM on vinyl. So far sales of new records are up 10% and seem to keep growing. Oh, and indie kids still buy a ton of the stuff.

This is excellent news for collection enthusiasts, completionists, and emo kids, I’m sure. My friend Dennis just picked up a USB turntable and ripped a few songs with it. The quality was pretty amazing, so why not bring the best of both worlds together? Vinyl and USB…a match made in a quirky, distant heaven.

Putting a New Spin on Vinyl Records [NPR via Slashdot]

iTTUSB05

If you’re not of the old guard of turntable enthusiasts and enjoy the atrocities of USB-powered turntables then ION has what you’re looking for. After all, vinyl has superior sound quality (if you’re into old and scratchy) and with these two, new models you can rip your favorites to MP3, so you can tote them around town. The iTTUSB05 and iTTUSB10 each come with EZ Vinyl Converter software that quickly converts vinyl tracks directly to iTunes. Classic features like dust covers, a stylus, and slip mats are included. Built-in pre-amps eliminate the need for an audio receiver with phono-in jack. And there are integrated RCA cables and 33 1/3, 45 and 78 RPM playback speeds. Both include a USB cable and 45 adaptor.

Both products are currently available at nationwide retailers. The iTTUSB05 retails for $149.99 and is sold at Urban Outfitters, Costco and other retailers. The iTTUSB10, goes for $249.99 and is available through Sharper Image, Hammacher Schlemmer, Frontgate.com, The 7th Avenue catalog and Restoration Hardware. Oh joy!

iTTUSB10

If you’re the kind of DJ who likes to dual-wield iPods or keep your vinyl on your MacBook, maybe you should take a look at this thing. It’s got a huge amount of features, ports for USB stuff, and space for you to put your own 2.5″ drive in. It has to be PATA, formatted for FAT32, but whatever. Judging from the sheer number of buttons, dials, and toggles on the top of the thing, you can do just about anything to your mp3 or wave files. It’s also got a tight little LCD screen and a proprietary music management program. Actually, I could do without that last one.

Denon DJ DN-HS5500

This Guitar Hero turntable controller, designed by this guy, evokes memories of Konami’s beatmania, the original music game series. As the above video shows, it works just like a proper GH controller, complete with whammy bar and all the buttons you need to complete face shredders on expert mode.

While I haven’t been bitten by the GH bug—I tried to play The Strokes’ “Reptilia” over the weekend and was absolutely abysmal—I am a fan of DJing, to the annoyance of 99 percent of you, I’m sure.

Guitar Hero Portable Turntable Controller [hustler of culture]

The PS-LX300USB is one of the most exciting new inventions to come down the pike in a long time. See, it’s a record turntable that connects to a computer. Records are disks encoded with music or spoken word and these records spin. A needle touches these disks and transmits the audio electronically to a digital sound thingie that puts it on the USB cable and then into your computer. If you have a lot of vinyl records — and you didn’t transfer all of them to lossless audio 10 years ago — then this is just the thing for you. It will cost $150 and comes with Sound Forge Audio Studio and a big steaming bag of WTF.

Product Page

This, the ATTIGO TT, is one of the best things I’ve ever seen, and I really mean that. Most of the time, meh. But this! It’s a touchscreen turntable created by one Scott Hobbs, a student at Dundee University. About the size of a regular turntable, this one is more Surface than Technics.

The video says all that needs to be said. But, if you’ve got a manufacturing hookup, Hobbs is looking to bring the ATTIGO TT to the mass market.

via PSFK

Denon Japan announced it will start selling a turntable [JP] that features a USB port to transfer music from analog records to USB memory sticks as digital music files at the beginning of next month. The DP-200USB will be available in black and silver  (price: $300).

Denon says all that users have to do in order to save music as MP3 (in 192kbps quality) is to play their 30cm or 17cm records and press the “record” button.

There is no word yet if the turntable will ever be sold outside Japan as well, but chances should be pretty good.

If you happen to still have LPs laying around and have sometime to dub ‘em onto a digital medium, this TEAC player might be for you. Or, if you happen to have grandparents that still enjoy their LPs and their turntable died on ‘em, this TEAC player might be for your. Perhaps, you are piecing together a 1970′s-style smokers room and need an appropriate sound system to complete the ‘look’, this TEAC player might be for you. Interested in the LP-R500? 70,000 yen ($715 USD) & available in December

Here is something cool from Japan for the many vinyl fans still out there: A portable turntable for your old records [JP]. The device, made by a Tokyo-based music and DJ equipment maker called Vestax, not only plays your records but also digitizes them.

Sized at 370x260x97mm, the so-called handy trax weighs 2kg. It’s equipped with a mono speaker (77mm/4W) so that you can listen to your vinyls without having to switch on a computer (if you don’t mind crappy sound quality). Music can be digitized through the USB port (both Windows PCs and Macs are supported). The device can be powered with batteries or an AC adapter.

Vestax is selling the Nippon-only turntable in their official online store [JP] (price: $140) and I don’t think the device will be exported anytime soon. So I suggest you ask Japan Trend Shop, Gizmine or Geek Stuff 4 U in case you need to get one.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve looked at turntables, so I rather expected a new one to have fancy features. The Stanton T.55 USB turntable is a no-frills turntable. Aside from the USB port, there’s little obvious difference between this turntable and the ancient cabinet turntable I inherited from my grandmother.

Overview: The Stanton T.55 USB turntable has an on/off switch, two start/stop switches for the platter, buttons to select 33 or 45 rotations per minute, and a cute little LED light. The Stanton also has a slider bar next to the needle arm which you can use to fine-tune to rotation speed of the platter, in case you need to manually adjust the palyback of your records. I didn’t find a need to do this with any of the records I used to test, but that may be my own ignorance as much as anything else. Also included in the package is a spoke to insert into 45 RPM discs, should you need it.

The outputs on the back of the unit consist of the titular USB jack, and stereo RCA jacks. Also on the back are two toggle switches; one for phono or line level output, and one for USB+vinyl or USB only output. The latter is used for “bypassing the phono preamp from the turntable when using for DVS applications.”

The T.55 is shipped mostly unassembled, so it was an illuminating experience to put the drive belt on. It was also illuminating to read the instruction manual on proper tonearm adjustment. None of the record players I had used in the past had any kind of manual adjustment for tone arm angle or pressure — of if they did, I never realized it — so it was interesting to adjust the counterweight on the back of the needle arm to get the pressure just right. Thankfully, the T.55 included a Stanton 500 V3 cartridge for the needle, so I didn’t need to twiddle the angle of the needle at all.

Overall, I was impressed with the construction of the unit. It’s solid, and has a good heft to it, for such a simple device. It looks nice, and ought to look good sitting next to any other home stereo equipment.

The manual has about 4 pages of information on the hardware, and then spends the rest of the document introducing software. I was surprised that Audacity is discussed in some depth, since it’s neither included with the product, nor officially supported by Stanton in any meaningful way. Nonetheless, the manual describes how to download and use Audacity to record MP3s from the turntable! Hooray for free software. Included on a CD, and described in the manual, is Cakewalk Pyro Audio Creator LE. I didn’t use this. I figure it doesn’t much matter what software you use to acquire and manipulate audio input from the T.55: if you don’t like the bundled software, you can find and use something else. I used Audacity to record a couple of discs, and it worked just fine.

Before I ripped any discs, though, I first connected the T.55 to my home stereo. I rocked out to the Jimi Hendrix Experience disc I “borrowed” from my old man all those years ago. It sounded just like I would have expected from a record, and I enjoyed listening to it. Next I hooked it up to my laptop and recorded one side of the disc. I played it back within Audacity, and was mildly annoyed. I guess I’ve become so used to CD quality audio coming out of my laptop’s speakers that the analog artifacts of the record seemed extra jarring. That’s funny, isn’t it? When I played the same record directly through my stereo the pops and hisses were perfectly acceptable, but when coming from my laptop’s speakers is was completely unacceptable.

I recorded a few more discs I had squirreled away, including several Disneyland Records like The Hobbit and The Black Hole. What a trip down memory lane that was! I found several other records I listened to as a kid, like Free To Be… You and Me. Here’s the opening of the baby sequence, which I’ve always enjoyed: Free to be … You and Me: babies

My parents left a surprising amount of vinyl, most of which is European folk dance music. I selected a record full of great polka songs to test out the noise removal function of Audacity to try to eliminate some of the pops and hisses. I think the end result is a little muted in comparison to the original recording, but I must admit I didn’t try too hard. After all, I’m reviewing the hardware, not the Audacity software.

Here’s a segment of the Little Brown Jug Polka as recorded by Audacity. The only effect I applied was “Normalize” in order to make it a little bit louder. Then, using that normalized clip, I took a noise profile using the Noise Removal tool, and finally executed a Noise Removal operation using said profile. Here’s corrected sample of the Little Brown Jug Polka. It doesn’t sound bad, but it could probably use a little more fine tuning to make it sound better. Like I said, I used Audacity’s defaults and spent zero time on this.

Bottom Line: The Stanton T.55 is a good turntable. It plays records, and allows you to record them. It has a very specific feature set, and executes these features well.

DJ gear is unique in audio in that more than any other equipment, it has to be flashy and able to take a pounding. Usually in the form of spilt beer. My main concern with Pioneer’s new DJM-2000 is how the touchscreen will react to the rough-and-tumble world of house music and ecstasy. But it still looks gorgeous. And you can hook in up to 4 CDJ turntables. 4! Unless you spontaneously grew extra limbs, I’m not sure why you would need that kind of power.

Specifications after the jump.

• Number of Channels: Audio x4, Mic x1
• Power requirements: AC 120V, 60Hz
• Power consumption: 42 W
• Weight: 18.7lbs
• Dimensions: 16.9in(W) x 16.1in(D) x 4.3in(H)
• Headroom: 19dB
• Sampling Rate: 96kHz
• A/D, D/A Converter: 24bit, 32bit
• Frequency Response: 20Hz to 20kHz
• Total Harmonic Distortion: 0.004% or less
• Signal-to-Noise Ratio: 107 dB (LINE)

[via Gizmodo]

Vinyl is not dead, friends, and the respected record player is not without modern updates. We’ve seen USB turntables before, but turntables have, historically, been pretty large edifices of technology. That changes today with the Crosley Revolution. Stripped of the cabinetry that traditionally accompanies a turntable, the Revolution is portable, features a built-in handle, and can run on six AA batteries.. It also features an integrated FM transmitter, so you can enjoy that warm vinyl sound on anything with an FM receiver: your fancy audio system at home or that Sansa in your pocket. Coming soon for $150.

Crosley Radio Puts a New Spin on Vintage Tech with Its First Battery-Powered Turntable, the Crosley Revolution
Portable, two-speed turntable features USB hookup, headphone jack and full range stereo speaker to share your favorite old-school tunes anytime, anywhere

Louisville, KY- (September 15, 2010) – Crosley Radio, the premier vintage electronics manufacturer, has taken the turntable out of the box with its new USB portable, battery-powered, two-speed turntable – the Crosley Revolution.

Supporting 33 1/3 and 45 RPM records, this sleek handheld device features an integrated wireless transmitter that allows you to stream music to any FM radio.

Plus, the convenient USB hookup and easy-to-use digitizer software suite offers vinyl aficionados a way to connect to Windows equipped PCs and Macs for easy analog-to-digital transfer. With these features, users have the option to swap vinyl songs with friends and create universal MP3 files, catapulting vintage music into the 21st century.

In addition to the wireless sound technology, the Crosley Revolution has a built-in full range stereo speaker and a headphone jack for optional sound enjoyment.

Running on six AA batteries, made of durable ABS construction and sporting a built-in handle, this portable turntable is meant to be toted along for any occasion.

The patent pending Crosley Revolution is available for $149.95 at CrosleyRadio.com. In addition to the black model, the Crosley Revolution comes in three custom colors (red, ivory and mint) offered exclusively at Urban Outfitters for $179.95. Other retailers include Hammacher Schlemmer, Brookstone and JC Penney.

Ever wonder how super angel and man-about-town Chris Sacca spends his Friday nights? Well, right now you can find him at Turntable.fm, a stealthy, you-can-only-get-in-if-you-know-someone online DJ party. I just stumbled onto it by accident. You can only gain entry if you are Facebook friends with someone already inside.

As it happens, I knew some people. Turntable.fm is a project of Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen, the two guys who brought us Stickybits. You enter and there are different DJ rooms to choose from. There are probably 25 people there right now (this is still in private alpha). But in one room called “Let’s rock old-ish hip-hop,” there was Sacca, Goldstein, YouTube’s Hunter Walk, and Mike Marquez of CODE Advisors. Sacca was playing “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa, up on the DJ platform (he gets to wear the space helmet because he has a lot of points, which are awarded to him by other people in the room who like what he plays).

Everyone in a room has an avatar and can chat with each other. You can create your own playliist and get up on the DJ table to battle it out. People tend to talk a lot of smack. But it’s fun, and addictive enough that I didn’t leave after 20 seconds. Turntable.fm needs a lot of fine-tuning (in fact a lot of the chat was about features it coud use, such as better animations for the avatars or different ways to award points.

In the end, Turntable.fm is really about hanging out with people and discovering music. If a DJ is playing a song you like, you can add it to your playlist, buy it on iTunes, findi it on Last.fm, or launch Spotify.

What’s a surefire sign that a web service has hit the big time? Well, when the celebrities start to pile on of course!

The guys behind GiantThinkwell and the Mixnmatch game have teamed up with the Grammy award winning producer, emcee and lover of the natural female form Sir Mix-Alot for a rare Turntable.fm performance celebrating the game’s launch.

“We’re huge fans of turntable.fm.,” says GiantThinkwell co-founder Adam Tratt. “In fact, we’re Cameron-Diaz-in-Vanilla-Sky crazy for it. (We <3 you, @seth & @billychasen.) Having Mix host a set in Turntable would be slick, but having Mix as a skinny white guy with a faux-hawk simply wouldn’t do. With our release on the way out the door and the sun rising in Seattle, we set our plan in motion: to get Sir Mix-A-Lot hosting a Turntable.fm room… with a custom Sir Mix-A-Lot avatar.”

In order to create a custom Sir Mix-A-Lot avatar, Tratt creatively rigged a custom piece of Javascript to transform the ubiquitous Turntable.fm icons into the spitting avatar image of Mix-A-Lot

Users who want to join the Mix-A-Lot room and see the Mix-A-Lot avatar can 1) Visit www.giantthinkwell.com 2) Drag the Turntable/Mixalot bookmarklet to their toolbar 3) Click on the bookmarklet to enter the room 4) Click on the bookmarklet again to see the custom icon.

Mix-A-Lot will be performing between 2:30 and 5:00pm PST. Still in beta, Turntable.fm Twitter mentions continue to soar, clocking in 13K tweets last week.

Turntable.fm founders Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen sat down with TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about the rise of Turntable.fm from the ashes of Stickybits, among other things. “It was less of a pivot and more of a restart,” Chasen said, on why he decided to dump the team’s original intent of making random barcode scanning a ubiquitous behavior in order to focus on the more promising Turntable.

“One day Billy came to me and said hey I’ve got this idea for a chat room with avatars and music and I said, ‘Hey that’s genius.’” Goldstein recounted. Fast forward from Turntable’s launch (via a single tweet on May 19th) to today, when the service is hitting a million songs streamed a day, with over 600K users, more than 300K rooms and 25 million songs “awesomed.”

“This taps into something pretty deep, people want to experience music together,” Goldstein tried to explain the app’s success. “The expectations were pretty low, and then when it hit it hit pretty obviously and it grew really organically. Our biggest challenge now is [scaling] the extent to which we have great coverage in the SF, NY and LA in music digital hipster indie community … How do we do we crossover to college campuses and really across the country to become a broader mass market consumer experience without losing this incredible passionate hard-core user base?”

The pair wakes tomorrow morning ready to face this challenge, with a cool $7 million in their pocket and a snazzy new iPhone app in the App Store.

Turntable today introduced Piki, a Pandora-like, human-powered radio app combined with powerful Twitter-inspired social features. With Piki, the most impressive part is that Turntable is one of the first music startups to get social right. The company has been working on the brand-new service for a year.

“There’s still demand to listen to music that’s powered by other people, instead of an algorithm like Pandora,” Billy Chasen, co-founder and CEO of Turntable, said during a demo for TechCrunch. “But instead of having it in very real-time, in a room like Turntable, we are providing a laid-back experience with Piki,” he continued.

Unlike competitors 8tracks or Songza, it has borrowed one of the most powerful features of Pandora. You just start the app and press play without having to search, browse, or select your mood. The stream goes through songs hand-picked by your friends and offers the option to select a particular genre.

When it comes to using the social aspect, you have multiple unique features at hand. You can share tracks that you like, which is called picking or repicking them. Even though you can add a personal message, you can actually dedicate a song to a friend and it will appear in their Piki notifications and streams.

To add a track to your profile, you can search the song database, choose a track on your iOS device, or make your phone listen and identify the song. Your Piki profile consists of songs you have recently liked. It is much more accurate than Last.fm’s profiles and much more useful than Spotify’s current profiles. At the same time, it isn’t as cumbersome as building playlists on 8tracks.

Piki has a desktop version as well. “Piki is for mobile — the web version is there for people that are using it at their desks,” Chasen said. Right now, users can register for an invitation on Piki’s website. The web beta should open its doors in the coming days and the iOS app will hit the App Store in a month or two.

Chasen was very eager to tell me everything about Piki. The team seems very committed to the app, which is in some ways a move away from Turntable’s current user experience toward a more mainstream and personal music product. “This is a year in the making. It’s been hard because, over the past year, people have asked ‘what’s going on,’ but we couldn’t really talk about it until now,” Chasen said.

Chasen believes that people use multiple music services even though it’s a crowded market. “If I want to listen to a single album on repeat, I’ll use Spotify,” he said. Piki is not the service on which you’ll listen to Lady Gaga’s latest album. At the same time, it is not a passive radio-like experience like Pandora. In the middle, there is room for a music discovery application that remains very personal.

With Piki, you can hear that one song that your friend plays at every party, or you can say that a song makes you think about a particular person. That’s the reason why I’m so excited about Piki’s social features. It goes back to what made music great in the first place: it is much better to listen to music with your friends than by yourself.