On 31 Jan 2012, at 11:06, TheLastMan wrote: > > cliveb;687037 Wrote: >> I've been digitising vinyl as a hobby since 1994 > > > > 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.
Same approach, same motto, although G.I.G.O. is the way I learned it: garbage in, garbage out. Best advice I can think of is to transfer only the LPs the contents of which you cannot get onto your HD any other way; and to use same quality of equipment or better on which you'd be prepared to listen to it. The process is a chore - times about 20 compared with ripping CDs, not least because of the manual entry, without the aid of any online database, of all the tags, and because it's not a process you can leave to itself, like CD rips. And then there's the cleaning beforehand, which seems to me to be greatly preferable to digital noise removal because it doesn't in any way risk the sound of the recording, but which takes an age. Better not to bother if you don't have; and if you do, better to make it worth the effort. My front end for ripping is a Technics SP10 Mk III, with SME Series V arm, Denon 304 cartridge, a Trichord Diablo phono stage with uninterruptible power supply, and a Meridian 502 pre amp. Soundcard is an M-Audio Audiophile FireWire, running to a Mac (but for eventual storage on a dedicated external HD), and monitored with Sennheiser HD650 headphones. It works very well. However, if an LP has been issued as a CD, I buy that rather than rip the LP. There is no post processing other than topping, tailing, splitting and tagging - and it still takes the best part of four hours per (classical) LP including the tagging. > _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
