Ion Quick Play LP review

Ion’s stylish Quick Play LP lets you easily rip vinyl records to your PC with an ingenious simple combination of hardware and software. Most people who’ve been into their music for a while, whether it’s prog rock or hard house, have the odd bit of vinyl lying around. If you collect classic LPs or white label singles, chances are you have quite a lot. Unfortunately, although we love the sound and feel of vinyl records, they’re not always convenient to listen to.

The Quick Play LP is a compact but fully-functional turntable with a pair of RCA outputs that allow you to connect it to an amp or set of powered speakers. It can play 33, 45 and 78rpm records, which makes it as capable of ripping vintage gramophone records as the latest limited edition purple vinyl indie single. The whole thing is powered a USB port on your PC, which also detects it as a USB audio device. The small cover and turntable only look large enough for a 7in, but our 12in discs were stable as they spun, and protruded comfortably from a specially designed gap.

Ion is the consumer wing of DJ equipment manufacturer Numark, so it’s not surprising that – although lightweight and inexpensive – the Quick Play LP has great audio quality when it comes to both its USB rips and the turntable’s analogue outputs. We were delighted by the accuracy of our audio recordings, which were free of excess hiss and unwanted background interference.

Using the Quick Play LP is incredibly simple – all you have to do is start the software, select your media type and start recording. By default, the software automatically splits your recording into separate tracks by detecting silence. You can disable this by unticking a box, which you’ll want to do if you’re recording a spoken word LP, a single-track album or one that contains tracks with false endings.