Samples from USB Turntables: Grace Digital Audio Vinylwriter (AVPUSB01 Options

[Knowzy]

Turntable Details

Grace Digital Audio Vinylwriter (AVPUSB01S)
Street Price: $70 (US)
Ceramic Cartridge
Belt Drive
Semi-Automatic
Wow and Flutter: Not published
S/N: >50dB
Platter: Plastic
Tracking force: 6.75g (Measured personally)
More in turntable guide

Photos

The Sample Clips
For background on the clips, see the "Preparation" thread.

All samples are FLAC and under 30 seconds.

Music

• CD LP Peg, Steely Dan, Aja
• CD LP On the Run, Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
• CD LP Dare, Gorillaz, Demon Days
• CD LP Dum Diddly, The Black Eyed Peas, Monkey Business
• CD LP Rhiannon, Fleetwood Mac, Self-titled Album (Dusty, scratched and skipping album)

Test Tracks

• LP Motor running, no record, tonearm at rest
• LP Ultimate Analogue Test LP, Side A
• LP Ultimate Analogue Test LP, Side B
• LP Hi-Fi News (HFN002) Test LP, Side A
• LP Hi-Fi News (HFN002) Test LP, Side B
• LP Silent Groove, Ultimate Analogue Test LP, Side B, Track 6

Musings
This is the last USB turntable with a ceramic cartridge I'm planning to test for a while. Next, I plan to move up the ladder and get samples from DJ USB turntables.

I felt it was important to demonstrate a second ceramic to show that the Crosley's poor performance was not an anomaly.

And boy do I have some poor performance to demonstrate!

I picked this turntable because several companies sell the same record player under different brand names. Grace Digital Audio, Memorex, Technical Pro, firstStreet and Innovative Technology have all claimed this USB turntable as their own.

I traced the turntable back to a Chinese manufacturer called Leetac Electronics. If you order at least 1,000 of them, you can slap your own logo on this USB turntable. I attempted to get pricing from Leetac but no one returned my e-mails.

The Grace AVPUSB01S arrived with a bent stylus and ruined my 30^th anniversary presses of Aja and Dark Side of the Moon. Read about the long journey to getting a working Grace turntable in the previous post, "Proof That a Ceramic Cart Damages Record with Single Play*."

The sound quality from the Grace is predictably poor, roughly on par with the Crosley. What surprised me was how badly it skipped.

Several music tracks I played skipped at least once. But the Gorillaz track was comically bad: It finished the four minute song in a minute and 8 seconds, skipping forward on every beat.

The Crosley had trouble with the Gorillaz track as well. It's turning out to be an excellent test case. The combination of an album recorded hot and bursts of low frequencies seem to make a perfect recipe for skipping.

I had a second, new stylus, so I tried the Gorillaz track with it. Same result.

Tracks 6 – 9 on HFN002 play a 300Hz tone at increasing volume levels- +12dB, 14, 16 and finally +18dB. The Grace handled the 12dB fine. Anything louder and it skips to the end of the track almost immediately.

Also notable (maybe related?)- The turntable exerts a whopping 6.75 grams of vertical tracking force on the record. As mentioned in the previous post, I believe the max for this cartridge is 5 grams.

Turntable folklore would have you believe this extra force would reduce skipping- the equivalent of taping a penny to a headshell holding a gentler cartridge. The pressure didn't seem to be an asset with the Grace turntable.

After spending all this time near the bottom, I am very much looking forward to moving up the turntable food chain.

[Audible!]

I would also like to commend you for your superb, absolutely invaluable (and apparently indefatigable!) efforts Knowzy.
The lack of rigorous testing of USB turntables is scandalous given the resurgence in interest in vinyl.
If your testing is more widely disseminated perhaps we'll witness manufacturers producing products of acceptable quality!

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

I would also like to commend you for your superb, absolutely invaluable (and apparently indefatigable!) efforts Knowzy.

+1

The lack of rigorous testing of USB turntables is scandalous given the resurgence in interest in vinyl.

Note that even high end audio ragazines that publish pretty fair technical tests of other audio products, slough off testing vinyl playback gear. Pretty much universal in the industry.

If your testing is more widely disseminated perhaps we'll witness manufacturers producing products of acceptable quality!

That is what happened to most categories of audio gear. Of course, vinyl is pretty much a dead art, and its inherent limits are so intractable that after 10 years or more of messing around, the industry jumped to digital.

However, this USB %$#!! seems to vastly understate even the limited potential of vinyl. People would be better off picking up a working used Dual 1219 from their neighbors garage sale or eBay, carefully installing a Shre M97Xe, and hooking it up to the phono inputs of a legacy receiver. The problem with that plan would be the difficulty for a vinyl newbie of properly installing that new cartridge.