Backside Bus

A few weeks ago I decided to build a fun sound system for my home office (see this post for details). The goal was something that looked interesting, sounded good, and was expandable. The Douk P1 DAC/Preamp/Headphone Amp serves as the centerpiece of the system. After using it for a few weeks, I can say that it is a decent piece of equipment. Pros: Small size Switchable tone controls Good Bluetooth (stable, easy connection, APTX support) Built-in DAC Cons: No optical input Unnecessary bright blue light on power supply Clicks when turning amplification on and off on Bluetooth It has a good build quality. The tone and volume knobs turn smoothly with soft clicks. It feels sturdy and all the connectors are solid. Setup is easy - plug in the tubes, connect to the speakers, plug the PS into the wall, and hit power. The tubes that came with my unit went right in - I didn't have to mess with the pins, but YMMV. Pressed power, flipped the switch to Bluetooth and the unit went into pairing m

About 6 years ago my father gave me a vintage turntable – a run of the mill 1980’s Pioneer model. That rekindled my interest in collecting and listening to vinyl records. A couple of years ago I upgraded my turntable to an Audio Technica AT-LP120XUSB. I didn’t choose the LB120XUSB specifically for the USB connection, but it is a useful feature that offers an easy way to archive my albums. I generally use it for records where the only copy available online (such as the Amazon “auto-rip” files) are in MP3 as opposed to a lossless format like FLAC or WAV. After some trial and error, I came up with the procedure here to archive my records relatively quickly and efficiently. Technology Needs Hardware This post assumes that you have a turntable with USB out, so I will focus on the computer side of things. You can do this process on either a PC or a Mac, as long as you have a USB port. I use a laptop (Surface Pro 7) to get the initial recording as my turntable is integrated into my entertainm