transferring vinyl to PC

[admin_exported]

dear all,

im in need of advice in purchasing the most sonically suitable method to transfer vinyl to WAV file. Cost of equipment is not a factor.

some questions:

-which interface will produce the least noise/interference? I.e 1394, USB, PCI based card, etc.

-if clarity, presense, separation and high notes/treble are of most importance, how does this affect the above choice in terms of signal to noise ratio, etc ?

thank you

 

[eggontoast]

You could try one of these http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/imic# just plug it into a Rec out on your amplifier and plug the USB in to your PC. All you need then is a suitable program to 'record' the audio, I would tell you what I used but.........I can't remember as it was so long ago since I did the exactly the same thing. I didn't get any power supply interference using the imic and the quality was good and its cheap to boot.

 

[Anonymous]

I once did some research on this, without actually doing it myself, so others may give you better information.

One strategy is to keep the analog signal far from the internal hostile environment of a computer. So a separate ADC. The other to buy a high quality, well shielded card from a specialized company like M Audio. I think both will work fine.

USB or F/W will not matter much, once the signal is digitized the way from ADC into the computer is not relevant. SNR ditto, once digitized it does not matter. SNR in general of the digitized material is a lot better than that of the vinyl source, even at normal CD quality.

You may want to sample at a higher quality (24/96) though. This is a huge one time effort and downsampling is always possible. Of course you need more storage and also equipment to play the high quality digital source then.

One further aspect: the software is very important in practice. Remember that you have to set the recording level. To low means that you do not use the dynamic range efficiently, to high means overload and distortion. Not good. Some software allows you to adjust this on the fly, so that you do not have to find the loud parts first.

Plus the ease in splitting tracks, annotating titles, etc. is also important.

 

[shooter]

Agreed on the A-D converter (24 bit Apogee or Lynx) and cable.

Also on the 24/96 recording and file archiving.

For starters i would clean every record you want to record with a 4:1 pure water and isopropyl mix, if you want also a second wash with L'art du Son, again 4:1.

If you need a cleaning machine have a look at Keith Monks and VPI, both well regarded.

Not sure what recording programme you are going to use but Audacity will do the job.

If your records suffer after cleaning from clicks (peaks) then these will have a effect on the recording with their huge dynamic range. To get over this problem you need to leave at least 20-30 db of headroom when digitising, more if the converter will allow it. You will then need to edit out the clicks manually and remove the headroom margin bringing up the peak near -1 to 0 dbfs. It's easier to use de-click software, run that first with either the very good CEDAR CT15 de-click or the cheaper Izotope RX remove any peaks and do a second pass with Audacity.