OT: Digitizing My LP Collection

At *best* an LP will have about a 60db range in audio signal. Any 16-bit sound card will cover this without difficulty. A 16-bit card has up to

96db audio range, even a bad card has 14-bits or resolution (84db) and so can meet the demands of the LP's without adding any of it's own "flavour" - providing some care is taken with the input levels. More bits (that is more genuine linear bits) makes setting the record volume easier as you have a wider range of settings that will still capture the dynamic range of the LP without adding any audible noise and distortion from the digitization process. but using A 24-bit card will be somewhat problematic. The card will most likely have no more than 20-bits that are usable and formats for saving the data are not so well supported, so you should "normalise" the volume (preferably over the entire album contents) and then convert the signal into 16-bit PCM (WAV file format). Don't use any lossy compression like MP3.

You need a *fair* quality phono preamp *if* you are sure the one you have already got is no good. There are still designs available on the internet - check the application note for the LM833 from the national semiconductor web site.

As far as software manipulation / equalisation goes, the golden rule is

*don't*. Whenever you manipulate the signal the most likely effect is that you will permanently loose information. Leave that for the working copies, not the archive masters.

If you have a free PCI slot, consider looking around for one of the older Ensoniq or Creative Labs "AudioPCI" cards with an ES1370 or one of its close relatives. They're inexpensive (I see several for under $10 on eBay), and according to tests Arny did years ago they're very good 16-bit performers.

All good points and advice, based on my own experience in doing this.

I do favor using a card with more than 16 bits of real linear capture (and some sort of 24-bit format on disk) for the reasons cited. It's definitely best to leave a good deal of headroom at the "hot end", so that you avoid clipping (this can't be un-done!). I usually try to capture with the average "loud" portion at least 10 dB down from full scale, and the hottest peaks staying several dB below clipping.

It's not unusual for one side of the capture to be louder than the other by 1 or 2 dB, due to variations in the cartridges... you may want to balance this out after capturing, when you normalize the recording volume for playback. If you do normalize (adjust volumes at all) make sure that your audio softare is capable of doing it properly... applying a "dither" to the signal when truncating it down to 16 bits for CD storage... this helps prevent the creation of audible low-level quantization artifacts. I preferred to write my own "adjust gain, balance the channels, and then dither and truncate" utility myself... that way I *know* just what it's doing.

Numerous others as well... googling "RIAA preamplifier schematic" turns up plenty. They're even available as kits (PAIA has one).

Agreed. First goal should be to have the "capture masters" be as clean and exact as possible an image of what comes right out of the cartridge (after proper amplification and RIAA equalization). Grab these files, then back 'em up immediately (e.g. to CD-ROM or DVD-ROM). Then, edit and clean them up to your heart's content.

I don't favor the "run the cartridge right into the sound card input, capture, and do the equalization in software" approach. The RIAA curve has about 40 dB of gain span across the audible spectrum... I think you'd have difficulty handling this much EQ after a 16-bit capture, without the risk of running into problems with noise and distortion.

One more point, and perhaps the most important: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). The quality limits of any good 16-bit audio card are going to be *far* less of an issue than issues with the LP, stylus, and cartridge... so pay plenty of attention to the latter.

In particular:

- If your stylus is damaged, worn, or mistracking, then replace it and/or fix or adjust the turntable.

- Clean the records, well and properly, before you play them for capture. Getting rid of pops and ticks and groove grunge by cleaning and de- static'ing the record is far easier and more effective than trying to remove them from the digital data via software! There's lots of information out there about methods for cleaning LPs well and safely... commercial vacuum cleaners, homebrew cleaning fluids, and even a technique for cleaning LPs effectively by using Titebond wood glue! [No joke... spread it on thinly, let it dry, and it peels off in a sheet and brings the dirt with it! Haven't tried this approach myself but quite a few people swear by it]

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
  I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
     boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

Recording and processing vinyl takes an unreasonable amount of time, far beyond the 50 mins or so to do the recording. 250x a couple of hours (if you cut corners) is 500hrs, or 12.5 weeks of full time work. The only sane advice I can offer is don't! Most of what you've got you can get better quality copies of online. Whether you can legally grab it free since youve already paid, or need buy new I'll leave for someone else. Just digitise what you absolutely cant get anywhere else.

NT

[...]

Everything had been digitized already; you just have to search the Internet.

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

Abby Brown wrote:

I can offer you some advice on this subject; I've already done it many timnes over. I'll take your concerns in the order you posted. #1) 24-bit audio certainly is good if you already have a sound card that offers it. However, I personally wouldn't invest a lot in one, especially if you aren't looking for audiophool performance. (Audiophools claim to be able to hear differences in sound quality produced by wires having different purities of copper.) I have a Dell with built-in audio and Realtek drivers too, and although I consider myself a critic of reasonably accurate reproductions, I find that my setup is completely adequate. This is certainly pertinent if your goal is to save all of your recordings in MP3 or other compressed file format. The MP3 format is a lossy scheme, and depending on the bit rate at which the audio is converted, can sound very bad to pretty good. If that's your goal, then I recommend that you dismiss a 24-bit sound card right away.

#2) A good grade phono preamp is a good idea, but again, you don't have to go broke to achieve good sound. I've compared the quality of reproduction between the preamp in a high quality audio tuner-amp and a good external ($35) dedicated phono preamp. Negligible difference to my ears, even when listening through headphones.

#3) USB audio digitizers are pretty good for the money. I've never used one, so I can't give any first-hand experiences, but friends tell me that they're good stuff.

#4) Audacity is a great piece of software for the money (FREE!), and it offers a lot of flexibility when post-processing your recorded audio, but it's not what I use. I use a program called "WaveCorrector", by Gannymeade

I've been using it since 2001 or so; not free, but I like it much better than all the rest of the packages that claim to do the same thing. It's purpose in life is the recording and post-processing of audio from vinyl records. It has a really good processor for detecting and removing the clicks and pops that are so annoying on vinyls. It also has effective noise profiling and graphical equalization filters. Quite a versatile package. The best feature is the click & pop processor. It actually looks for features in the audio waveform that looks like a click and applies a smoothing algorithm to the waveform to remove the click without affecting the rest of the audio. It's very effective, and saves LOTS of post-processing time.

Having said all that, after you have all the hardware and software operating, the single most important theng you can do is to clean your records. If you aren't going to save your vinyls for posterity, then you don't have to be so careful with the cleaning solution. There are many recipes for cleaning solutions on the web, but I have used liquid dish-washing detergent (Dawn, Ajax, Palmolive, etc.) with a few drops of Jet-Dry, a great spot-removing surfactant. The Jet-Dry allows the detergent to really wet the surface and loosen the dirt. Buy a label protector such as the Groovmaster

or make one yourself or I use a flat edging paint applicator from Home Depot (such as the Shur-Line Model 1000c) to scrub the grit out of the grooves. It's bristles are stiff enough to scrub the dirt & grit from the grooves and soft enough that it doesn't damage the vinyl. Much better than the paint brushes they recommend/ Good microfiber cloths are good drying towels... gets the moisture off the surface without leaving any lint behind (you'll hear the lint as a click or pop).. Finish the drying in a dish rack with a small fan blowing across the records. Many of the purists recommend a final rinse in distilled, deionized water; I have always had good luck with tap water.

Hope this helps. I have transcribed well over 200 records onto CD using this method with great results. Many of my transcriptions can't be discriminated from a retail CD album. A caveat... getting the recordings as clean as possible can consume HOURS uoon HOURS of your time. It's just a matter of how many you are willing to put into your project. Cheers!

--
David
dgminala at mediacombb dot net

One suggestion is look to see if any of them are still available to buy as CDs. A lot of back catalogue material is available to buy digitally remastered for probably less than the cost of your time to do it and at a far higher quality.

Try it first with the sound card you have and see if it is in fact the weakest link. You do need a good preamp - and preferably one that does not occassionally pick up nearby taxi radios as breakthrough.

I have used a soundcard to digitise rare analogue cassette recordings without having any problems but the noise floor off tape is higher.

Save the masters as is. You can always tweak them later.

Remember to verify that the recording you made actually sound OK and have not clipped or picked up extraneous noise or skipped a groove.

Regards, Martin Brown

On a sunny day (Sat, 4 Jun 2011 18:10:04 -0400) it happened "Abby Brown" wrote in :

Use the sound card, 48 k samples stereo should be enough, encode to mp3 at highest quality setting with 'lame' in Linux if you have little space. Save on DVD and external harddisk too. Make one large encrypted version of it, name it bugs.exe or something that does not look suspicious, and upload it to your website, or if you have a 1G email space to there. I also keep 2 extra harddisks, makes about 5 or 6 copies, and I also keep the stuff on a USB flash and also on SDcard. With so many copies on different media and in different locations, it is unlikely (mm I think I have some on CDs too) that you will ever lose your collection.

I couldn't agree more. This is exactly what I have been doing.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------

That's an expensive option. $15 * $250 is a chunk of change. A lot of the "digitally remastered" stuff is crap (and I'm no audiophool). The time to do it isn't all that great. It can be done while doing other things, even listening to music. ;-) I did it a while back (then lost the disk). :-(

A good preamp is what you used last time you listened to them. ;-)

Taxi radios? All the taxis I've seen over here use cell phones.

Tape is horrible. I don't know how they ever sold prerecorded cassettes. A sound card will be far better.

But that's part of the "experience". ;-)

Save uncompressed. Hard disks are cheap.

Yes. Most important is to wet the disc with your anti-static media (wipe).

I have also found that breathing (believe it or not) at the needle during the playback removes even more of the static ticks which can occur.

Still, it has been noted that a lot of stuff has already been digitized, and yes, just as good as yours or better.

And I'll bet that you used MP3.

If you want the best, switch to a lossless format, like FLAC.

If you used MP3, all this blathering about how much care you took to make good output for the encoding means nothing.

First thing you have stated correctly in ages.

The zip options allow one to "store" a file without ANY "compression".

You need to get a clue because you cannot differentiate between a stupid text file and an audio bit stream.

FLAC does NOT "compress" ANYTHING. That is why it is the same size as the original wav file.

Now I know you are an idiot.

A frame of redundant info in a video MPEG-2 schema gets skipped. There is no such analysis made on music data streams, and that is NOT what is referred to when the term "lossless" is used.

It removes spaces of blank 'info' and replaces them upon playback.

The original data is what ends up getting played.

That is NOT EVER the case with MP3.

I'd certainly see if the albums exist on CD. You do need to be careful as once in a while double they drop a song on the CD version. This happens say if the original was a double album and they put out only one CD.

Usually USB audo is cleaner since it doesn't sit inside the PC.

Personally, I wouldn't equalize anything, but that is just me. Audacity is a fine program, and takes very little effort to use. You can consider using Audacity to remove the clicks and pops, but keep the original file.

I've ripped my CDs to hard drive in FLAC format. It is lossless. However, drives these days are cheap. You might just want to leave the audio in PCM.

I make it a point to keep the originals should there ever been an issue I downloaded the music elsewhere. I'd certainly keep the album jackets.

I think the real question here is not the ADC, but rather the front end gear (cartridge, preamp, turntable). I'm not sure what they use for album cleaning these days. Remember the discwasher? Also the anti- static devices (zerostat, or that brush with the polonium to ionize the air).

I don't miss the LP in the least.

You said FLAC was *not a compressor all* and the FLAC home page on the first paragraph says your wrong. The fact is you didn't / don't know the difference between lossless compression and lossy compression.

If you read further about FLAC on (links on the same page I already gave you) you would see it does much more than "remove spaces of blank info".

It is also apparent that you have little understanding of things like acoustic masking, the difference between audible and inaudible and redundancy and entropy. You need to have a basic understanding of them before you can usefully engage in this thread.

Entropy?

You have already experienced it between your ears.

Depends on the source material. A lot of 70's stuff went onto CDs pretty early on and is now around £3 ($5) over here. Several labels like Naxos have scoured back catalogues of classical music for good performances and made budget CDs of rather excellent quality. I'd be very surprised if it was more expensive over the pond.

The time to do it properly is at a minimum 2 hours per 45 minute disk if you verify by playback. And longer if you have to redo anything.

I did test my new power amplifier with the old turntable and preamp. I had forgotten just how tetchy about induced magnetic fields, acoustic feedback isolation and earth loops these old magnetic cartridges were. Line level CD output is just so much less hassle to set up - plug in and go.

CB rigs then. It was one of the annoyances I remember when I was transferring stuff from vinyl in the past (a long while ago).

All the older material was on professional tape at one time. And a portable tape deck is hard to beat for recording live interviews.

I have somewhere a bad copy of Wish You Were Here with a skipped groove from doing vinyl transfer. I gave up and bought a genuine new CD in the end when it was in some BOGOF deal at the supermarket.

You can set some price limit if you like, but I reckon if you can buy a new one for under $10 it isn't worth spending 2-3 hours faffing about to make an inferior digitised version of an old worn vinyl disk. YMMV

It is a completely different matter if you have a tape of a one off irreplaceable performance or something that is no longer available.

Regards, Martin Brown