OT Vinyl to MP3

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Thu Feb 21 23:40:35 2002

Well ... I don't know what your listening habits are, but what I overhear from
many people's listening suggests that things like signal-to-noise ratio are
pretty irrelevant.

Having said that, if you want faithful reproduction, you will want to sample
the sound with a sampler, and not with one of the <$100k sound board circuits
that is in every PC these days. You can get pretty decent sampling from any
of a number of circuits sold by various vendors these days, notably Crystal
Semiconductor, (Maybe Clint Wolff can help clear this up.), some of which can
sample at stereo rates with 20-24 bit samples. If you build a circuit around
these chips but put it in an environment that's "clean" in the sense that all
the digital switching noise normally found in a PC isn't there, not on the PSU
and not on the ground lines, and not on the signal lines in any other sense,
you have an opportunity to reclaim what you can get from the medium you're
wanting to transcribe.

I spent a lot of time with this back in '95 or so, at which time I was trying
to transcribe my jazz vinyls and some of my reel-to-reel tapes of live
performances, done with just 2 microphones.

I found, first of all, that, for most recordings, even the sound card approach
was quite adequate. Secondly, I found that software, and particularly
sampleware, was pretty ineffective, regardless of what it claimed, for
removing the annoying shot noise that vinyls often have, due to static or
dust. I also found that most of the software I was able to try made sound
quality worse rather than better when it was turned loose on my transcribed
tunes.

I've never had any interest in MP3, but ISTM that people willing to listen to
what most of them listen to nowadays get what they deserve when they use MP3,
and if it's to their liking, or more for their convenience, and since they can
tolerate the 3db signal to noise ratio of a live performance, they certainly
won't mind the slight distortion that MP3 introduces.

For those of us who want high-fidelity, well, we have to build our own stuff,
because it won't work very well inside a computer regardless how much it
costs.

Dick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chad Fernandez" <fernande_at_internet1.net>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 10:04 PM
Subject: Re: OT Vinyl to MP3


> What bit rate have you listened to? I usually use 320kbit, and they
> seem to sound okay. Although, if I do manage to find a turn table and
> start trying to transfer records, I'll go to cd as you suggested Jeff
> do. Actually, I'd probably do both..... until I need HD space.
>
> Chad Fernandez
> Michigan, USA
>
> Glen Goodwin wrote:
> > Not to suggest that your uninformed, but you *do* know that MP3 is lossy
> > compression? I know some people like MP3 due to the small size of the
> > files, but they sound like dirt to me. Why not just convert 'em to
> > CD-ROMs???
> >
> > Glen
> > 0/0
>
>
Received on Thu Feb 21 2002 - 23:40:35 GMT