Foreword

Today, (24 January 2004) the long awaited turntable arrived to my house. This is a little chronicle of the event. It is probably totally useless.

Musical Rebirth

Benissimo! Let us begin! The turntable is a magnificient Numark TT-200. It is a long time since I last composed music, it is also a long time since I listened to music, but I never felt music composition leave my being. I chose the Numark and my Mac as the media of my musical rebirth.

Why the TT-200

I chose the Numark thanks to the advices of my friend Fabio, reviews found online (especially on the wonderful website turntablelab.com), out-loud thinking with Geppo and the Happy Mondays, and many lonely considerations. It seems the most logical choice, for price ($178) and features.

Event

Around 1.30PM a nice FedEx guy rang at my door. He had a huge package on his shoulder, and he greeted me with "How you doing?" while he was handing me over the huge package. Since I still don't know what to respond to this rather illogical yet typical american question, I just said "Thank you" for giving me the precious package. I immediately noticed the tag "Samedaymusic", and cheered upon that. The man was already leaving with the following greeting: "Take it easy!". Alright.

Samedaymusic

Of course it was not "same day" deliver, but it was fast and cheap. I chose Samedaymusic to buy the Numark and an Edirol UA-20 sound input device. They have a well-done website; they offer a service to beat any lower price; they have free shipping over a certain amount; and they seem to be musicians, not just people selling stuff like Etronics or Walmart. I placed the order on January 19th at 8:15AM Pacific time. It shipped the same day at 3:07pm Pacific time, as the name says, via FedEx. The tracking info informed me that the probable arrival was on Saturday 24th of January 2004. It arrived Saturday 24th of January 2004 at around 1:30PM.

Package

The package was well done, as you can see here and here, but maybe I would have done it in a different way. The Edirol box was kind of squeezed between the turntable box and the exterior box, with no padding between the Edirol box and the outside box; also, the foam was only on top of the turntable box: no foam on the bottom of the external box(this is illogical, in fact). Anyway, it was an acceptable, yet not perfect, package.

Inside the Box

Inside the box there was the turntable! First I found some manuals and a poster with many Numark products, then I found the plate, the slipmat, and the beast! The TT-200 is in fact rather heavy, I would estimate 4 or 5 Kg (VERY rough estimate), anyway the feeling is of something very heavy that doesn't move or slip away that easily. It is metal (aluminum) on top of a plastic bottom. I must say its consistency is very nice to the touch, I couldn't stop touching it, in fact it was like a big woman, except of course it is cold and hard. The play/stop buttons are soft when you push them ;), though. And all you wanna do, you want to get down to that.

Box

My excitement obfuscated my mind. Something was missing. And the Numark box was nice. So I decided to fold it back to put it away. But I noticed that the inside of the box had a list of the included items. Of course I double-checked the list double-good: immediately I realized some pieces were missing! Most importantly, the headshell! Cazzo! E adesso? The course of action was simple: I stepped back into logical mode. I said, Let's analyze the entire content. I checked all the already opened items to see if something small slipped under something big. It was not the case. So I went back to box. And did I find some surprises. Numark has a nice way to organize things. Some of the smaller items were not into the box: they were carved inside the foam. (Like the man in Tetsuo puts a metal piece into his leg.) The foam was carved to accomodate the headshell, a key and a round object. The most intelligent package I ever saw.

Numark

The overall contents can be seen here. I also made a picture of the bottom side of the TT-200, because I think it has an interesting layout.

Digital shit

Yes, I also bought a digital interface for my mac. After all, I need to sample the turntable into the Mac.

NeXT

It would be nice to interface the TT-200 with a NeXT cube, but for now its companion will be the pale white skin of my iBook. And my mind.