"Digital Vinyl"? - Page 6

In your case I would look at Memepool's very nice list of inexpensive used turntables to consider.Many of these can be had for less than $100. Musicianfriend and Hollywooddj have good prices on the Technics 1200/1210 MK2 at around $399 shipped.You will also need a cartridge for these.

As far as I know The Library of Congress use a Technics SP15 ($900 in 1988) for their digital preservation of records. I sort of remember these being made primarily for radio stations ? These can be picked up for $300 or so.

I would imagine that the new tonearm,cartridge,new plinth and custom tweeks would bring the price above 10K pretty fast.

You say "most", is there any advantage to transferring vinyl above redbook standards?

I would imagine that this is pure speculation on your part

Why not contact them and ask then what their set-up is ?

I still have about 100 LPs, which I never play, but if I were to transcribe them I would not bother going above 16/44.1.

I am skeptical about the value of doing high res transfers on a medium that is so technically compromised (no offense to LP, but it is what it is and no 5000 quid TT will change that)

First 16/44.1 already has superior noise, dynamic range and distortion levels than LP so it isn't a limiting factor in terms of a transfer.

Second , so far as I know , nobody in anything even remotely resembling a carefully proctored test has been able to tell the difference between high res recordings and downsampled high res recordings. When you consider that so many people cannot tell Mp3 from wav it is hardly surprising.

Third 16/44.1 A/D/A chains have been shown to be undetectable in playback as far back as 1988 when the Boston Audio Society showed Ivor (I will never make a CD player) Tiefenbrun that he could not detect the presence of a Sony PCM-F1 (nominally 16 bit) inserted into the chain.

Fourth CD-R recordings of LP vs LP tests have been done - no difference found.

Fifth the sheer space requirements of uncompressed 24/96 or 24/192 for dubious payoff. 3.26x the space for 24/96 or 6.53x for 24/192

It just doesnt seem worth the effort...

I did see one of their turntables on a PBS program about 10 years ago.None of their gear is factory stock and all of it is custom rebuilt and tweeked by the employee who was interviewed.He refused to give details about what it is and what he did.

It gets harder and harder to read your posts without busting out laughing. Seriously, Library of Congress?? Actually I think they use a Technics 1200.

--Jerome

Oh dear. Please read what I post before trolling off like that again. To paraphrase your response.

Tarkovsky - Be careful of how you record because digital clipping is absolute and easy to do as RMS meters don't show transients which can easily be lost in the process
Bigshot - WAV files are good enough quality for most listeners

See the incoherency?

Furthermore I'd like to explain the issue with downsampling as people are still not getting to grips with this.

If you take a wave, record it to vinyl in RIAA form, you're going to end up with some of the natural distortions of the format like crackle and dust and stereo seperation (but less so timing based imaging AFAIK). That's fine to me.
If you take a wave and make it a PCM/cd, you're going to loose some v high and low frequency detail. Quite good compromise really for ease of use.
If you take a wave and make it a cd, you'll loose high and low freqs, then the mp3 will remove some imaging and bass information and add artifacts. Still acceptable for a lot of use.

Now if you take a wave, make it a vinyl, make it PCM, then make it an mp3 or the like you get all these SQ problems. And it'll sound like cack.

A transient that is incompletely captured by sampling at 44,100 means that it must rise and fall in under 1/22,005 of a second, to be completely missed it must rise and fall in less than 1/44,100 of a second. A transient that lasts less than 0.023 milliseconds is probably perceptually invisible.

That's not really true because lots of material is remastered from vinyl when they can't find the master tapes and if looked after properly and transcribed on decent equipment by skilled people it can sound very good.

Reading between the lines here I think Steve's inputs mostly come from the experience of actually doing transcriptions and judging them in terms of what sounds good rather than worrying too much about the theoretical specs etc....

For instance the Sony PCM-F1 (early 1980s) mentioned above is pretty antiquated by the standards of even a basic M-Audio soundcard you get today for a few hundred dollars, being I think 14 bit and struggling to reach red book standards. However I know people who still use them and they can still make great recordings on the whole, because this was a very well designed piece of kit which cost a packet back in the day and has proper mic - pre amps etc which is the kind of thing cheap modern kit skimps on.

In pro audio people pay huge sums for just a few channels ripped out of an old 1960s Neve or SSL desk for similar reasons. It doesn't matter that on paper a basic modern digital recorder will have better specs. The point is that specs only tell part of the story and all audio equipment in real world usage imparts a character into the signal chain. There is no shortcut to well engineered analogue circuit paths using high quality components.

So returning to the point of the OP and to what ssportclay is saying about source first, with vinyl it makes sense to get the signal quality coming off the record as high as possible and you just won't get this with a plastic turntable that costs 100USD.

You are much better off spending that kind of money on an older vintage deck which was made to a better standard in the '70s when these kind of things were not cheap and plasticky.

I think most sensible people would agree with this. But arguing that it takes a $10,000 turntable to achieve good results is patently absurd.

--Jerome

Of course I don't think you have to spend anywhere near that amount but good turntables are ridiculously expensive these days and it is pretty easy to spend that much in the USA especially if you are buying stuff imported from Europe. If you are on a limited budget it makes much more sense to buy 2nd hand or else upgrade an older design like the Technics SL1200.

Good solid engineering quality is the most important thing in a turntable and anything made of cheap hollow resonant plastic like that Ion deck or the kind of stuff you find on Amazon won't show you what the fuss is about with vinyl.

If that's the kind of budget you have then you really have to go 2nd hand or else if you only want to transcribe a few rare records get it done professionally or by a friendly head-fier with decent equipment.

I didn't mean to suggest that you did; someone else made that argument. I agree that analog gear (as with any other audio component) can get very expensive, but there is good quality gear to be had for budgets both big and small. This is a point that you have made many times in the past and that should not be lost on people reading this thread.

As Steve said, the advice should help people get better sound, not persuade them that they can't afford it.

--Jerome

That I'm not so interested in. The issue is that you will easily and unknowingly clip the original recording in that the re-recording because RMS meters don't show transients. That's why RMS levels should be set to under a third of the bandwidth on your meters at 24 bit.