Citronic USB Audio Capture Device

I hoped that this would give me a better A2D than my old sound card for transcribing vinyls and tapes, but I didn't expect much at the price. Wrong!And from the description, I expected only A2D. But this does D2A too, and does both very well.The performance of this little gismo is amazing. I connected its analogue output to its input, fed it some pure and mixed tones from the computer, and read them back in. First surprise: with the input pot turned full up, the absolute levels coming back in were only a few percent different from the output levels (slightly higher, as is happened). I've never had that before! Then for the quality test proper, I normalised the returned signals back to the source levels, and Wow! The component sounds held their relative values within fractions of a percent in amplitude over a range of frequencies and amplitudes. And that was going through the thing both ways! (Mind, I've not tried this with very low signals yet.)The software? I haven't used it yet. All the controls except setting the sample rate are physically on the device, so you don't need special software. That is a rare thing nowadays, and a very strong point in favour of this machine.I wanted the thing for an elderly Slackware system and my old copy of audacity doesn't support USB. So, to see if it worked, I plugged it into a Micro$oft XP system (without installing audacity). Without being asked, and with no special software, XP used this device instead of the old on-board card (and yes, I can tell it to go back if I want to) and it sounded excellent. Then back to Slackware and an hour or two spent finding out how to tell it to use the new device! When I found out how to do it (trivial once you know what to type in), I did the quality test with the results given above. (Although I use audacity for some jobs, I just use rec/play/sox where they are enough.)Always a tricky question (unless floating-point digital is supported) is whether to clip or to limit. It's not possible to make a good real-time limiter without a long delay line, and few suppliers of non-real-time limiters bother to provide anything but junk anyway. On the other hand, finding clipped sections in an LP that's taken ages to record is no great joy. This machine has a good answer -- it clips, but the output is so steady and predictable that it's easy to set it up not to happen. Far better than the trigger-happy OTT limiter of my old sound-blaster which made you use trickle-level input or get landed with gross distortion at even modest levels. I'm very happy with what this product offers me.I'd a temporary concern that the volume was very low on Micro$oft XP and had to be turned way up (which made things OK), but that was Micro$oft's doing -- on my Linux system, all the controls stayed as they were with the PCI card, or sometimes got turned down a little.Is there any bad news? Yes-ish. It generates a string of harmonics of mid-range frequencies, but they are 60-70 dB down on the fundamentals so you're unlikely to hear them. (They showed when I compared the FT spectra of the source and the out-and-back-in signals).Summary: incredible performance at the price (although it's no longer available on Amazon at quite as low as I paid earlier this week), and as a bonus, it works a treat on Linux.

Good product well packaged and easy to setup works fine. The only reason I gave 4 instead of a 5 is that it cannot be used on its own as a phono preamp as well as a computer capture device. I tried plugging into a usb port to power it and my turntable and soundbar and the green light came on but no sound was present. Therefore unfortunately it requires Audacity running on a PC (in my case PC running Win10) and whilst this is no biggy it just might have been nice to use separately. installation was easy and whilst the instructions were obviously for an earlier version of Audacity it was easy to setup and got working within minutes.Other than that the build quality is fine and the sound quality is good. Nice piece of kit!

I have a load of old tapes of live recording from the 1980's, and wanted to transfer them.I'd previously used a simple cable system of taking the audio output from an old tape deck into the audio input of my PC, which worked well.However, I've recently moved over to just using a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with desk dock, and nothing I tried worked.Finally I gave in and started the search for an alternative mechanism, and came across this system.Brilliant!Setting it up was an absolute breeze, as you just connect the phono to this and then the USB output to your PC.It comes complete with Audacity on disk, but you're probably best to just download the latest version, as it's free (opensource). When you open this for the first time it looks very daunting, but there are loads of guides online, and in reality it is unbelievably easy to use this software for the capture.I would recommend that you save it as an Audacity project and then output as mp3 (what you really want), as I found that I wanted to go back and do some rebalancing and cleaning, which you can do on the Audacity project without having to recapture. You may have more fun with this software than you think.These aren't top quality recordings, but nonetheless I am ecstatic about the results.The only other thing you will need is phono cables: I got the Kenable, which are great.

Gives a distorted output when used with a Technics 1210 Mk2 turntable - it cannot handle the signal from the turntable. You cannot change the gain using the front knob as this only works with a line input. Not fit for purpose, returned for refund.

no so easy to use I'm afraid- lots of reading + trial + error

I bought this product hoping that its microphone would be better than the standard one provided with most laptops. In fact, the AC-1 USB Audio Capture Device produced more static than anything else I have ever used before when recording. There is so much static that it's not listenable even with noise reduction applied.However, in the process of reducing static by turning off other appliances, I found out which one was causing the problem. Turning this off whilst recording on the AC-1 made no difference, but it made the laptop microphone recording much clearer. About £30 clearer.So, although it didn't directly solve my problem I was still able to improve my recording quality.FYI I was recording the output of a PS One through phonos and the gain control light on the product was red throughout.I assumed that the static would be the same as on turntables (mentioned in other reviews) but it's not.