The Stanton T.90 turntable offers professional DJ features with USB recording functionality. The bundled software is easy to use and produces great results. It may be overkill for many users, but DJs will appreciate all the extra touches.
Donald Bell
Donald Bell has spent more than five years as a CNET senior editor, reviewing everything from MP3 players to the first three generations of the Apple iPad. He currently devotes his time to producing How To content for CNET, as well as weekly episodes of CNET's Top 5 video series.
Although the T.90 looks beautiful, you might be surprised when you touch it and realize how much of the exterior is plastic. Aside from the platter and the tonearm, high-grade plastic is used in abundance.
Looking at the pitch control, you'll see a Pitch Select function at the top, allowing you to switch between an 8 percent and a 12 percent pitch range. In the middle you'll find a Pitch Lock button, which quickly locks the speed to an unaltered original setting. At the bottom you'll find the Key Lock button, which serves the unique function of maintaining the original, unaltered pitch of the recording, yet allows you to slow down or speed up the song's tempo.
You'll notice that Start/Stop buttons are located in both the upper-left and lower-left corners of this photo. Redundant controls insure that DJs can access the Start/Stop function regardless of whether they orient the turntable horizontally or vertically.
Here you can see the connections on the back. Looking from left to right, there is the stereo RCA output, phono/line switch, USB connection, digital S/PDIF output, AC power input, and power switch.
The bundled recording software is streamlined specifically towards archiving analog recordings from LPs and cassettes. You can use Pyro 5 to record, edit, and enhance the recordings you make from your albums, then save the results onto a CD or export it to WAV, MP3 or WMA files.
