A turntable and a HomePod: welcome to digital Goldbergia

I cleaned off a (large) space and moved my Sony PS-LX310BT turntable to my desk yesterday.

Previously, I had been listening to it through the soundbar on the entertainment center in my office here. I used the hardwired analog line out and it worked pretty well. It would have been nice to have better speakers, sure. But the whole thing did an alright job.

There was no room on top of the entertainment center to stick the turntable. Instead, I slid it into the shelf under the TV where you'd normally stick a VCR DVD player Blu-ray player uh… a video… game… I guess?

I gave it plenty of clearance above so the dust cover lid could open. I bought some magnets, stuck one to the front edge of the dust cover, stuck the other to the roof of the space, and viola! I could lift the dust cover, let the magnet hold it, and put a record in.

Record player nerds (I'm sorry, I'm not worthy… especially because my ears barely work these days) will tell you playing with the dust cover lid closed is bad because resonance. I didn't want to do it. Then, one day, while a disc was spinning, the adhesive holding the magnets on just randomly gave way, unceremoniously dropping the dust cover with a smack and shocking the whole player. The needle bounced a whole track away. Yiiiiikes.

I started putting the dust cover down while playing. It was fine.

Ehhhh, though, it was kinda awkward. Plus, that entertainment center was really good at transmitting the slightest footfalls directly to the player, so I had to tread lightly lest I get more skips. Rather than fall down another accessory rabbit hole, I put the whole thing on top of a carefully-folded old towel, which worked-ish. Kinda hated it though.

Turntables are really meant to be on top of surfaces. My office did not really have surfaces to offer. I let the problem roll over in my mind for a little while and decided to give up a corner of my desk. After the aforementioned cleanup and reorg.

Reader, I hadn't realized how much joy it was taking from me to try to put records on a turntable from the front. My vinyl hobby is fueled by physicality, after all. A big part of why I've gone so far down this road over the past few years is just how much I love the feeling of taking a large disc with analog grooves, settling it down on a soft pad, and pushing the button that expertly lifts and gently lowers the needle onto the record in just the right place. It feels so much better to operate a turntable out in the open—I'm more connected to all this.

Got all that back. But now there was no way the analog lines were gonna reach back to that sound bar.

The PS-LX310BT has a several output options, which was part of why I bought it. There's Bluetooth (the "BT"). The soundbar also does Bluetooth and it's fine. My hearing is probably _just_ far enough gone that I can't really hear the compression.

But there's also USB out. Now here was an interesting proposition. Also on my desk is my trusty M1 Mac mini. And the office HomePod—one of the OG models.

I like HomePods. I think they sound pretty good with Reduce Bass turned on. But they don't do Bluetooth. And they don't have a line in. You can ask them to play music off a supported cloud service or you can use AirPlay, built-in to just about every Apple device, to stream something to them.

When I had first picked up the turntable in late 2020, I had the HomePod, and I had the same soundbar. I also had a tiny apartment. I settled for Bluetooth then, and eventually reorganized the apartment entirely so I could use the soundbar. But what I really wondered if I could do was leverage a computer that was gonna be on anyway to pipe the USB audio to the HomePod. Especially because that meant I could also choose to use the other HomePod in the other room.

I don't know why it's so difficult to take an audio input and pipe it to an audio output. If I could do that, then I could have the mini stream to the HomePod and be done. But it's substantially easier said than done. And I wanted something that wouldn't necessarily require me to log into the computer and straighten out every so often. After some digging, I landed on Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil.

Airfoil is designed to cast some kind of sound source (like my turntable's USB audio, or the system sound, or an arbitrary app) elsewhere. It can directly stream to HomePods or other AirPlay destinations, meaning I don't even have to change how the mini's sound output is configured.

It's also got this extra really neat companion app called Airfoil Satellite that I can run anywhere, but in particular an iPhone or an iPad. It can control the mini's Airfoil remotely (in case something's not quite right, I just need to grab my phone), but it also becomes a sound destination for Airfoil—I can play my turntable on my phone, including through hearing-loss-turned AirPods Pro.

The one challenge I ran into with Airfoil was that it seemed the turntable was super quiet. I could turn it up at the destination, of course—though it seemed it was a worryingly level of "up".

The PS-LX310BT has a switch on the back that mostly fixed this, it turns out. The left switch, found on many modern turntables, just goes between phono level and line level, depending on your receiver's needs. That doesn't affect the USB audio at all, as I would expect.

The other switch though, did, to my surprise. That one is a gain select. I firmly expected it to only apply to the line out. Because why would we have gain on a digital output? Well… we do. Flipping that to high solved it, and I don't think it's distorted.

And since I cleared out a big space in the entertainment center, I was able to move my Atari 2600+ and the Nintendo Switch dock (video games!) underneath the TV instead of struggling to find a foothold on the surface of this… honestly rather small bit of furniture.

Pretty sweet, yeah? Even if, I suppose, it's a little overcomplicated in the end.