On account there are folks on this forum that know a thing or two about the art of recording audio to a digital format, I thought would try posing a question. But first the setup:
My teen-aged son and I were watching recent episode of Fringe where Peter repairs an old turn table for his alternate reality father, Walter. My son commented how he was at a friends house and that they pulled out an old LP player and he listened to vinyl analog recordings for the first time. This prompted me to go to the garage and fetch my British-made Regga turn table and LP album collection. They had probably been entombed for 20 years. The Regga is an audiophile turn table, tone arm, and stylus cartridge - it was about a $500 combination in early 1980s dollars. It's very simple mechanically. The motor is off in a corner and conveys motive power to the spindle via belt. The platter is 1 inch thick solid glass. Instead of an electronic feed-back loop to regulate the rotational speed, it instead relies on the fly wheel effect of a massive platter. The bottom line is the design and construction keeps the stylus very well insulated from extraneous vibration. My son was, well, blown away from the sonic experience of listening to vinyl LPs played on this system. It was though he were listening to music for the first time. The detail, spatial location, subtle texture, dynamic range between quite to vibrant strains were all more alive than iTunes music. A good way to tell is listen to the 1978 recording of the Pat Matheny Group album vs the iTunes version of this music. You'll be tempted to just delete the iTunes version - it's just flat and stale sounding in comparison to the analog vinyl. So all this has lead me the matter of what to do with my album collection. I'm thinking that the main problem with modern MP3 download music is that the dynamic range has been overly compressed. Surely I could make digital recordings from the phono output of my turntable that would retain the character of musical experience? Do I need to use a phono preamp before feeding a signal into the audio input on my computer? Should I invest any any particular analog-to-digital audio hardware device? What software would be good to use? I'll be recording entire sides of an LP at a time and then wanting to go back and split it into separate files per each song. Is there any software filter that specializes in reducing pops and clicks from analog media? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
