The turnable saga continues. The headshells came, they look pretty good. Slightly heavier than the one that came with the Stanton, but not by much. They’ll do. The new cartridge/needle assembly also came, as did the rubber mat, and the new USB audio interface. That all gets assembled tomorrow.

I did have some time to unbox the USB audio interface (Behringer UFO202) I’d ordered. It’s smaller than a deck of cards and has the USB cable permanently attached. Plugged it into the Win7 laptop, drivers auto-installed, etc. Didn’t get to do much more than fire up Audacity and verify that I could access the device from that. I also sampled a few seconds with no inputs attached to the little box, to get its nominal noise profile. I have the plot (strange noise profile for an audio device– peaks in weird places that don’t seem to correlate to freqs I’d expect to see coming from the power supply, sampling rate, etc). Max noise peaks at -63dB or so, most of the curve lies below that. (Note to self: Post a plot later once you figure out how to embed). I want to get a longer audio sample of this base noise anyway, so I can use it for reference noise later should that ever be needed.

Also played with some of the earlier ‘throwaway data’ I’d captured using the Stanton’s built-in USB preamp. (Audacity again). The original still sounded as horribly tinny as it did the other night, but was also not too difficult to clean up and EQ. Before long I had managed to make the sample much less horrible than it was. Not a great record here, some generic-looking album from the late 50s/early 60s full of ‘Spanish Orchestral Classics’. I might end up seeing if I can do something useful with the string sounds (this assumes that I manage to recover anything interesting).

Assembly tomorrow. Probably.