cliveb;687037 Wrote: > I've been digitising vinyl as a hobby since 1994
Clive B was a great help to me when I started digitising LPs in 2008 just after I bought my Duet. He and I are old school UK vinyl audiophiles with, coincidentally, very similar systems we have virtually identical hardware but I have a slightly different take on the digitising process. Just keep the phrase rubbish in, rubbish out in your mind when sorting out your equipment and workflow. The most important thing to spend time and money on is your analogue replay equipment closely followed by a high quality, low noise ADC and/or sound card. To make the recording I use my much loved 20 year old Linn LP12 Sondek turntable with Ekos tone arm and (rather newer) AudioTechnica ATOC9 Mk2 cartridge. This feeds a Naim NAC72 pre-amp, which has a superb vinyl stage, powered by the Naim Hi-Cap power supply. The sound quality of this setup is easily a match for CD and is astonishingly low noise and high dynamic range for an LP system. To replace this with an equivalent vinyl replay system today would cost many thousands of £/$/. I take the output from this into a M-Audio 2496 PCI soundcard (about $200) in a PC running Windows XP. I monitor the recording through headphones to avoid any chance of audio feedback through the turntable. Although this system will record at 24/96 (hence the soundcard name) I rip straight to red book compatible 16/44.1 FLAC files using Vinyl Studio. Where I part company with CliveB is in the post-processing of the recording. I dont. This is for a few reasons, - Life is too short. I prefer to spend time on other more interesting things such as listening to music. - I have never been bothered by minor low level clicks, pops and surface noise when playing the LP so why should I be bothered by them when playing through my Squeezeboxes? - I find most automatic noise reduction filters to be obviously destructive of the music signal - If a disk is -really- noisy I bin it and buy the CD. If the CD is not available new I put a wanted request on e-bay for a second hand CD or better quality copy of the LP if it has never been released on CD (a very rare occurance for the kind of music I listen to). Just occasionally I will use the manual de-click facility in Vinyl Studio, but only where there are obvious clicks in the gaps between tracks or very quiet passages provided there are not to many of them. I have a very low boredom threshold and will bin it and buy the CD in a trice! Because I am so impatient I like to keep the whole process as short as possible. Using Vinyl Studio software saving fully tagged FLAC files takes about 10-15 minutes on top of the time spent recording the LP. Most of that time is spent setting the start and end points for the tracks. Using Vinyl Studio you can download tag information and cover art while the LP is recording. I am just over halfway through this project. I started with around 500 LPs in 2008 and now have about 200 left to do, working out at about 1 or 2 a week. One bonus from this activity that I did not anticipate at the outset was rediscovering my LP collection. I am listening to music now that I had not listened to for a couple of decades. That is what keeps me going. Without that I would probably have given up long ago. -- TheLastMan Matt http://www.last.fm/user/MJL-UK *SqueezeBoxes:* SB Duet (Controller + two receivers) *Server:* Synology DS107+ (500GB) NAS running LMS 7.7.0 on SSODSmod 4.14 *Network:* Netgear DG834GT ADSL modem/router, 2 x Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 as access points *Livingroom:* Receiver into Naim 42/110 amp, B&W CM2 speakers *Kitchen:* Receiver into Denon DM37 mini-system, B&W 686 speakers *Study:* Linn LP12, Naim 72/Hi-cap/Headline. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TheLastMan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16021 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=93265
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