HARDWARE

Next you will need to start assembling the hardware for your system. First you will need a turntable if you want to do vinyl records. If you also have some old cassette tapes you may also want to have a tape deck. Most of the electronic stores such as Rex, Best Buys, and Circuit City etc. carry some turntables. Or you can type Turntable or tape deck into a search engine or on Ebay and order one on line. You know your own financial situation so make your choices on what you want to spend that will give you as much quality as you can afford. You will also want to look at the possibility of adding a good quality soundcard to your computer. Maybe you already have a good sound card and won't need to purchase that either. You may have to purchase some cables to connect the various things to the sound card. Beside the cable also keep in mind that you may also need adaptor plugs to go between the various components and cables. Another component you may need is a pre-Amp for your turntable. Here again you may not need one depending on weather you turntable has a preamp in it. Also some sound cards also come with a built in pre-Amp. The DMX 6Fire by Terratec does for one. It also comes with a bay mount front where you can plug the cables into the front of the computer. This saves crawling behind the computer every time you want to change cables and components. Another thing you probably will want is a pair of headphones, that way everyone else in the house doesn't have to listen in on your works in progress. You may also need another power strip to power the additional equipment. You may want to do searches on the Internet of any one or all these hardware items to get an idea of price ranges and quality of each component. You may already own most of these things if not you will want to start looking at what is available. There are some stand-alone record players with CD burning capabilities. You may want to go that route as well. If purchasing items try to look at what kind of connectors are on the various components so you have an idea of the cables you may need or adapters.

You may also want to buy an amplifier-tuner for sound amplification and listening to or recording from radio. It would not be a requirement but you may want to add that at some point down the road.

After you have decided what you need to purchase the next step would be to start getting the components together. When you start gathering them up we will look at software as the next consideration. If you buy an all-in-one type unit the software may not be as in depth as for the many variable of the other components. That's why I'll give you a week or so to search around and at least get an idea of what you want as far as quality and affordability of the components you choose. Next week we will look more in depth into software.

To those of you who have systems up and running maybe you will want to leave some additional things that maybe I missed. Or share a specific piece of hardware that you are using.