Vinyl has come full circle.

How can you tell when some trend moves from a small circle of aficionados to the mass of normals? When there are mediocre options for partaking in it.

Like vinyl. When records were the primary medium for recorded music, you could buy a dinky little turntable for five bucks at a toy store. It sounded like crap, but you could listen to your Partridge Family 45s at your sleepover and that’s all that really mattered.

Then, when vinyl almost died, forget buying a $5 turntable. You couldn’t get a record needle for less than $50. That’s because the only people still spinning turntables were record-store nerds, audiophiles, gearheads, and other geeks for whom money was no object in pursuit of sonic excellence. From, say, 1990 onward, there were no low-end record players because there were no low-end record listeners.

Now you can buy vinyl from Best Buy, Urban Outfitters, and Hot Topic. Those buyers - the ones who don’t just hang those records on their walls, anyway - just want to hear the records. They aren’t too finicky about audio performance.

So here’s the Ion Audio USB Turntable. It’s a record player. You can digitize records with it, or play records through a conventional stereo system, or just listen to the built-in speakers. It is absolutely nothing special - but then, neither is vinyl anymore. Vinyl has come full circle. Vinyl is “back”. Vinyl is free to be mediocre. And that’s fine. Let the record be unbroken.