Review on Pyle Home PTCDS5U Vintage Turntable: Versatile CD/Cassette/Radio/Aux-In, USB/SD/MP3, Vinyl to MP3 Encoding - Black by Lukundo Lim

After looking at many options for turntable all in ones I finally settled on the Pyle Vintage PTCDS5U and I have to say that overall I love it I'm quite happy with the money I spent. As I ordered the product for delivery to India I had to pay a significant additional cost for shipping and customs but it is well worth it. As you'd expect for the price, the controls feel fairly flimsy and you have to be careful when using the sliders to switch between Phono-Band Radio-CD modes. The quality of the laminate is also quite decent. But that's probably all you can expect at this price point. If, like me, you have a huge collection of old (and slightly dusty) vinyl records, this is the perfect purchase. Expensive turntables could give you a much better sound, but they would be much more sensitive to dust. The great thing about this device is that it can play almost any media you own (I have a lot of cassettes too). Plus, the platter has a speed of 78 rpm, which saves a day if you just need to play that weird old record. After buying this system I also bought some new records and they play pretty well too. Another great feature of the system is that it runs on both 110 and 220 volts, so I didn't need a special converter to get it working in India (where 220 volts is the standard). Now some observations. To be honest, it wasn't until I opened the box that I realized how small this system looks. My memories of vintage turntables led me to expect the system to be much larger (but maybe I should have paid more attention to the product dimensions mentioned in the details). The second problem is that the sound output from the device is unsatisfactory. I wish I had a slightly more powerful amp to go with it. Another observation is that the sound lacks bass when playing vinyl, but the bass increases significantly when playing CD/FM radio/cassettes. In fact, some of the old LPs (especially the "mono") sounded much better than the new ones I bought (the "digitally remastered" sounded particularly bad). I can't get much bass out of my recordings even with Bass Boost on, but when playing other media at high volumes I often have to turn Bass Boost off to minimize sound distortion. Sound. The cassette deck only has one spindle that only snaps onto one of the reels - I'm not sure what would happen if the tape was "eaten" off the reel in this case (although I haven't had such a bad experience so don't go too far)!). The position of the playback head is such that cleaning the head and roller is quite difficult (the roller is practically inaccessible). As for the convert to MP3 feature, it works well but there are some issues. If you're using an old flash drive, make sure you feel the initial lag before the recording actually starts, otherwise there's a good chance you'll miss recording the first few parts of the music. Hardware only converts at 128kbps and that's by no means a standard speed for archiving (I'd prefer a faster speed - at least 256 if not 320kbps). I would like to end this review by mentioning that as always the package arrived in perfect condition and well ahead of the scheduled delivery date - thank you Revain!