I've done this with a PC for myself and for friends
with irreplaceable records that will never be
available on a CD. Sound boards don't have much in the
way of amplification for a turntable cartridge, so I
use a pre-amp with RIAA equalization. My memory is a
little foggy here, but records are cut with a funny
frequency response to compensate for the medium
itself, which an RIAA pre-amp compensates for while
amplifying the signal. I built an inexpensive
Vellerman kit but its only one-chip deal. A little
embarassed about buying a kit, but I was in a hurry.
It was only like $12US and about 6.00 of hardware and
a wall wart I had lying around. I think you can buy
one built for 20-40$.
NOTE: you MAY be able to do the RIAA equalization in
software, and MAYBE a MAC has a pre-amp built in.
Unless you have a truly outstanding turntable, a great
cartridge and needle, and absolutely virgin (and
darned good quality to begin with) albums, you will
WANT to clean up the sound.
On a PC, the S/N ratio of a cheap sound card isn't
very good going in or out. Good boards like boards
made for this purpose or higher end Turtle Beach
boards have multilayer, thoughtful designs and
separate isolated linear power supplies actually
designed by analog engineers, not "catalog engineers".
You'll have to decide if what you have is OK or if you
need something better. No point on spending big bucks
on it if worse noise is coming from somewhere else.
Take the ground connection on the turntable seriously!
Makes a big difference.
The software you get with a "one button vinyl-cleanup"
is OK (like Adaptec's, which they licensed), but there
is better software out there that lets you play with
the noise in a graphical, scope-like manner. Problem
is, this takes time and some talent. Do this for a
while and you will see how audio engineers can spend
weeks on just one record project like this.
The "automatically make CD tracks from record cuts"
feature in a lot of software looks for pauses, making
it fail on classical music and also on bad vinyl,
which is probably what you have. Record the whole
thing and cut apart the tracks yourself.
Setting the sound levels is tricky, especially from
record to record. You don't want to record too low
(and lose dynamic accuracy), or too high (and get
distortion). Again, unless you have outstanding
equipment, one channel will be louder on average, and
good software can adjust for this.
I think for the time you will put in, you would be
best off making a true CD of your efforts, and then
MP3'ing that. Costs a quarter extra these days. VBR
(variable bit rate?) type MP3's are very, very good;
these days with cheap storage, silicon and otherwise,
I don't see any reasons to use less than 192Kbps
straight which, to my ear, is just fine for all except
the most critical recordings. Unfortunately, when I
made or obtained most of mine, the software I had
could do only 128kbps, which makes even some rock
music sound bad, particularly cymbals, snares, etc.
Just my $0.02USD.
--- Glen Goodwin <acme_ent_at_bellsouth.net> wrote:
> > From: Jeff Hellige <jhellige_at_earthlink.net>
>
> > I'm about to experiment with hooking a 20 year
> old Technics
> > turntable up to my B/W G3 using a small pre-amp
> between them. It'll
> > allow me to convert all my old vinyl to MP3
>
> 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
>
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Received on Thu Feb 21 2002 - 23:11:02 GMT