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 October 1,
2005
 Something
Old, Something New: TEAC GF-350 AM/FM Radio, Turntable, CD Player/Burner
When I was a kid, my parents owned a small console
stereo they positioned near the top of the steps leading to the living room of our
split-level house. I remember sitting at the top of those steps and listening to the first
45s and LPs I bought. (Some of them are still in my collection and are surprisingly
playable.) TEAC’s GF-350 reminds me of that console -- it even has a similar latch
that locks open the turntable lid. Of course, my parents’ stereo gave us a choice of
only AM radio, FM radio, and phono. The GF-350 adds a CD player/burner. "We wanted to
design something easy enough that my mom could use it," TEAC sales and marketing
manager Gary Sheeran told me. "But we also wanted it to have more modern
features."
The $399 USD GF-350 is attractively designed in the manner of a 1960s-style console, with a flat black finish that gives it a slightly updated feel. Its analog tuner and semiautomatic turntable will be reassuring to those who enjoy vintage technology, while the CD player lets them enjoy the convenience of digital playback. The CD player doubles as a CD burner that’s remarkably easy to use -- push a few buttons and you’re ready to go. Sheeran says that TEAC has "just been blown away by the response" to the GF-350. It was designed for listeners who enjoy the convenience of CDs but feel nostalgic for their experiences with LPs and 45s. Although TEAC isn’t marketing the console to audiophiles, I think they might find it useful as an archiving tool (more about that in a minute). Its speakers are, like those in my parent’s console, the kind of small cones that are expected to play, without nuance, all the frequencies contained on a CD or record. The result is surprisingly listenable -- the kind of thing that would be great in a sunroom or somewhere else you’d play music casually. The semiautomatic turntable is also comparable to my parents’. The tonearm has a ceramic cartridge with a replaceable stylus, and the turntable has three speeds: 33, 45, and 78rpm. The GF-350 appealed to me because I’ve long wanted a way to transfer some of my music from black to silver disc, but I didn’t have space in my audio rack for a component CD burner. It was the turntable’s 78rpm option that really grabbed me, though, and that should make the GF-350 attractive to anyone who wants to archive those old, delicate pieces of shellac. I have two turntables, and neither plays 78s. I do have a pile of 78s stored away, which the GF-350 enabled me to finally listen to and record. I picked three: "Hey, Good Lookin’," by Hank Williams; "I Almost Lost My Mind," by Nat Cole; and "All of Me," by Frank Sinatra. I cleaned each of them with distilled water and copied them to CD-R. To begin recording on the GF-350, I loaded a blank music CD-R or CD-RW into the player; the GF-350 records only to digital-audio media, not the CD-Rs used for storing computer data. Most stores sell both. The unit reads the disc and verifies that it’s ready to record. When I loaded a standard blank computer disc into the recorder, the GF-350 read "No Disc." It did, however, play any recorded and finalized disc I’d burned on my computer, regardless of the disc’s format. After I’d successfully loaded the disc, I pressed the Record button, dropped the tonearm into the lead-in groove, and pressed Play. I didn’t have to monitor the unit too closely while burning records because the tonearm lifted at the end of each side and stopped the recording mechanism. I preferred stopping the recording manually, though, since the sounds of the tonearm lifting and the turntable shutting off became part of the final product. I compared the results of my disc with copies of the same recordings in other formats. I listened to the Hank Williams tune on CD and LP, then played the CD of the 78 I’d just burned. The 78, while noisier, was much more immediate and vibrant. The same was true of the other recordings. After listening to the recorded 78, the digitally cleaned-up version of the Sinatra tune from The Best of the Columbia Years 1943-1952 [Columbia/Legacy 48673] sounded a step removed from the source. I wondered how much better a magnetic cartridge with a 78 stylus might make these records sound. While burning those 78s, I learned something fairly quickly: mistakes recorded onto a CD-R with the GF-350 aren’t correctable. It records in real time, rather than storing the source as a file for later burning. It can erase CD-RWs, but an error on a CD-R is permanent. My advice, therefore, is that you lay in a few music CD-RWs. You can erase and redo any bad tracks on CD-RW, then finalize the disc when it’s recorded to your satisfaction. The GF-350’s erase time is swift: 11 seconds for a single track, 45 seconds for an entire disc. When you’ve finished recording, it finalizes the disc in a little over a minute. At that point, you have a disc that will play in any standard CD player. From there, you can burn the CD-RW to CD-R on your computer, where you have the option of using standard recordable media. You may have to search around for music or digital-audio CD-RWs. I went to five retailers, including the usually reliable RadioShack, before I found any. I burn a lot of vinyl to disc because many of my friends and co-workers know I still play LPs and have asked me to convert their records to CD. Most of their records have been poorly cared for, and I usually use one of my old styli for the transfer. With the GF-350, I didn’t have to be concerned about stylus wear, since replacements are inexpensive. It was also a lot less hassle than my usual method, which was to run a lengthy cord from my amp to a computer and record a .wav file to my hard drive. A friend had asked me to transfer about 25 LPs to CD, and the GF-350 made the job a lot easier. The recorder can automatically separate each track by reading the dB levels as the source plays and assigning a new track as the level of one song drops and the next song begins. The user’s manual warns that this method might not be accurate for analog sources, and that turned out to be so -- one LP somehow ended up having 99 tracks on CD. I chose instead to either record each LP side as a single track or to manually move each track count forward as I recorded the source. Various 78s and 45s I recorded didn’t pose that problem, since the turntable shut off at the end of each record and the recorder advanced by one when I burned the next platter. As soon as I listened to the recorded discs on my usual gear, I knew that the GF-350’s onboard turntable would never suffice for an audiophile. Fortunately, the GF-350 has an auxiliary input at the back of its cabinet that allows you to send CD players, tape decks, and other external sources through it. I ran a line from the Tape Out of my integrated amp to the GF-350’s Aux input so I could compare a track burned with one of my turntables, a Music Hall MMF 2.1 with an Ortofon OM10 cartridge, to the same track burned with the stock ’table. I chose an older, somewhat worn copy of a Sergio Mendes LP because I didn’t want to subject any cherished record to the GF-350’s tracking weight, which was probably close to 5 grams (my tracking-force gauge ran out of measuring room at over 4 grams). In addition, the stylus is roughly the size of a .38-caliber slug -- not a big problem for the wide grooves of a 78, but a stylus this big could damage an LP’s narrower grooves. As I expected, the ceramic cartridge sounded brighter on "The Fool on the Hill" and picked up loads more surface noise, while the Music Hall produced less noise and more musical detail. Phono-stage outputs can often be lower than that of a CD player or tape deck, but the key to recording any external source with the GF-350 is to leave the recording level, which you can increase or decrease, at flat response. I found that any increase led to unsatisfactory results, such as distortion in louder passages. Another archival function that’s easy to do with the GF-350 is transferring tapes to CD. One of the hazards of scouring budget bins is that you can be enticed by deals on [gulp] prerecorded cassettes. I realize that the quality of those tapes isn’t very good, but some of mine are obscure enough that they’d be hard to replace. Tapes or LPs I tried to burn on my computer have small skips on them (probably caused by some limitation on my computer), a problem that never occurred with the TEAC. I ran my tape deck directly into the GF-350’s Aux input and burned several prerecorded Blue Note tapes that I’d picked up about 15 years ago. I had replaced many of those tapes with CDs or LPs, but others were out of print or hard to find in another format. I was pleased with the results when I played the discs on my usual gear. Relatively little tape hiss transferred to the disc (I played the tapes without Dolby), and there was more detail than I might have expected. I won’t pretend that the discs I burned sounded as good as LPs or CDs, but they were surprisingly listenable, even on higher-resolution gear -- in some ways, they had more sizzle than the first-generation Blue Note CDs. I soon found myself going through my tape collection to find other music I wanted to transfer to disc. I’ve never scorned cassettes, and tapes I’d made myself using good-quality tape still sound good, thank you. But now I could create more permanent versions of music from cassettes I had worried about playing because of cheap tape mechanisms and shedding oxide. The drawback to recording some external sources on the GF-350 was that I had to stand watch in order to assign a number to each track, and to pause the recording when each tape or LP side ended. As I noted earlier, automatic track assignment for analog sources can be tricky, even though the GF-350 has three sensitivity settings that allow it to compensate for the noise levels from the source. The well-designed remote control makes it easy to move the track numbers forward without hovering over the unit. In time, you should be able to recognize the kinds of sources the GF-350 can assign tracks to more accurately -- LPs in good condition and well-recorded tapes. I had to be sure to stop the recorder and finalize the disc when I was finished recording. If the burner on the GF-350 reaches the end of an external source unattended, it will continue to record until it reaches the disc’s capacity, then automatically finalize the disc -- the final product might be a CD with 40 minutes of music followed by 40 minutes of silence that a CD player will count off until the end (another reason I suggest you use a CD-RW). This same vigilance applies to copying CDs, which burn disc-to-disc in real time. While the track numbers on digital sources should transfer accurately, a disc with stops and starts or wide dynamic range will probably benefit from having them manually assigned. I spent a lot of time with the TEAC GF-350, and had a blast putting some of my old tapes and a few LPs on disc. I also rediscovered how much fun it can be to just listen to music and not worry too much about fidelity. Sure, when I want to listen critically, I prefer my tube-amp setup. But on Saturdays and Sundays, when I listen to music while everyone else in the house is still sleeping, the TEAC GF-350 is just fine. Plus, the CDs I burned with it sounded great on more revealing gear. I hope TEAC will consider putting a turntable with a lighter-tracking tonearm and a magnetic cartridge in any future models such as this one, but I think the GF-350 will bring a lot people around my age back to vinyl. That’s music to my ears. …Joseph Taylor Manufacturer contact information: TEAC America, Inc. Website: www.teac.com
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