Portable Vinyl Player
So you are thinking about or have already waded into the latest wave of collection and playing of vinyl. There is so much new material and some excellent new artists that are creating great music on this medium that is being developed on this very old technology. It is a very mechanical technology that was developed from a mechanical age. The technology has been refined but remains substantially unchanged since the early 1900s.
It is the very tactile nature of vinyl records that I believe has found favour with a new generation of people that have had little or no experience of this technology. I believe that it will continue to have a following because of the sterile nature of the digitally supplied and consumed experience. Music is a product that engenders strong feelings within the consumer. Essentially people want have something to touch and feel, because they have a strong ethereal attachment to the music and they like to have something to focus that feeling toward, vinyl fills that need.
When you’re looking for a portable vinyl player there are 5 main features are probably looking for.
- Convenience and portability
- Great connectability
- Built in speakers
- Battery operation
- Enjoying the experience with friends
The convenience and portability is crucial to calling any turntable portable there are quite a few turntables around that are small enough to move fairly easily and I have seen other sites calling these midsized units portable but I don’t believe that they are truly portable. Most of the types that I’m talking about don’t have a handle to pick them up and walk away with them for a start. They will generally have built in speakers like a portable but generally will need two hands to pick them up and move them around. The Crosley CR6010A-RE Collegiate Portable USB Turntable this is a nice unit and has a good sized speakers but not what I would call a portable.
A really portable model would be something like Sylvania Turntable Record Player with USB Encoding – or the not quite as portable Electrohome Archer Vinyl Portable Record Player Classic Turntable. Both of these turntables are truly eligible to be 
called portable they are lightweight and have handles to pick them up with. The only problem that you are likely to encounter with any portable model will usually be sound quality. This is to be expected as the size of the portable models usually restricts the size of the speaker that will fit into the portable case and power requirements for battery operated models. There is usually some kind of compromise that designers of portable vinyl players have to make when building lightweight conveniently sized record players. The sound quality for the types of places and occasions when you are needing to use a portable turntable will usually mean that super hi fidelity and quality of the sound is a secondary consideration.
A more important characteristic for a portable vinyl player would be how connectable the unit is. It is important that you are able to plug in to an external set of speakers that will deliver plenty of sound or to be able to connect your Smartphone or tablet to the vinyl player and use it as a music system. It’s very likely that you’ll want to connect your portable turntable to other systems in various ways is going to make a much more useful turntable and allow you to share your music experience with others.
The best portable turntable I’ve seen has connections for RCA plug 3.5mm audio plug, USB and Bluetooth. These types of units can be connected to almost anything that you’ll need to connect to. They are very versatile players that can even turn your vinyl LP’s into MP3 format so that you are able to capture that warm sound that is such an attractive feature of records.
The only use I have found for this feature is to be able to record an album that has rarity and value beyond the desire to play the medium. At one time it was my intention to record all of my collection to MP3 until I realised the enormity of the task. A quick calculation soon made me realise that I would have to be recording 8 hours per day, every day for quite a number of years in order to turn that whole collection into MP3s.
Since I like playing vinyl this seemed not only to consume time that I did not have but was futile anyway apart from that saving of my records that must at some time in the future become worn to a point where I wouldn’t be able to play them. However I’m figuring this to be so far into the future that I will be too old to manage putting the record on to a platter and playing it. Therefore a large part of the pleasure will have been foregone so there’s no point.
Anyway back to the portable turntable – battery operation is a very desirable characteristic of portable vinyl player. The players that are available now have some very smart technology built into them. Unlike the earlier years when record players were not so smart and used lots more power to achieve the same results. Battery operated portable vinyl players from many years ago generally made them quite heavy and the battery life was far less than it is now.
Battery technology has improved out of site from those bad old days. The efficiency of the motors and electronics of modern record players is vastly better that it used to be. Consequently portability of record players and all electronic products is amazing compared to say the 1940s and is still improving.
The upshot of all this is that you can take a relatively small portable vinyl player with you anywhere. You can enjoy the pleasure
of analogue vinyl LP’s almost anywhere that you are. Not only that you can take the player with you to friends and plug it in to bigger systems and your portable player becomes the bigger system belting out your favourite sounds on a bigger scale that it could on its own. You can share it with your friends or with a special friend. You can take it on a trip with you and play it in really remote places that the original designers of the technology could never have imagined.