[Thelonious Monk]

hi. i've known for a while there are ways to get vinyl onto a hard disk (i'm acquainted with some nice hagerman tech products) but recently read up on numark's ttusb. does anyone think this would be a good way to archive vinyl? i'm too lazy to flip any kinda disk, but there's tons of nice vinyl around here on the cheap. i figure i could buy a bunch up, archive it, and give it away on headfi. not interested in vinyl as a hobby, just as a way to get lots of music for a small price.

i am only looking for opinions of people with hands-on experience, i'd rather not have any stupid arguments derailing this thread. just want opinions for/against this vinyl-to-bits technology.

 

[edstrelow]

I'm sure it works, but I wouldn't expect great sound from a $200.00 turntable and cartridge. For the same price you could buy a cd recorder and if you already have a good turntable I think you would get better results recording from the pre-amp out. .

 

[ralphp@optonline]

I agree with edstrelow, while the Numark turntable will work, i.e. record vinyl onto a hard drive, I don't believe that it will do so in a manner that one would term "archival". A much better method would be to use a higher end sound card or other kind of analog to digital converter along with a better quality turntable. People have been archiving vinyl to digital for quite some time now and I'm sure that there are many Head-Fiers who can give you feedback on some of the better hardware and software choices along with some of the better methods available to help one produce archival quality recordings.

 

[sandyr]

Digitised my vinyl some years ago so would suggest that you look at the free Audiograbber which is the prog I used for extraction and which is fairly versatile. Surface noise is the root problem and I filtered with the facilities of Goldwave (Wavelab is also good). Guard against overfiltering since the resultant sound lacks life. Were I to do it now, I would use the amazing LM1894 chip from National Semiconductor which denoises according to the incoming signal by reducing bandwidth on quiet passages.

Don't know the Numark but I would avoid rigs where control over the processing is sacrificed.

 

[jiiteepee]

You get quite qood results even w/o getting HighEnd system for that conversion. Just don't use onboard audio from your PC/laptop ... Those USB Turntables (like from Numark and AT) are usable but maybe not as good as your present Turntable->Pre-amp w/ RIAA stage->Hi-fi/amplifier --> soundcard would be (depends on your sound card...).

To get best possible results, all you need are
- your vinyls in good condition,
- a better than just good pre-amp w/ RIAA stage,
- soundcard which works @24-bit as intend (also use samplerate which gives you best/straightest fequency response for 20Hz and 20kHz ... I recomend 88.2-96kHz)
- arcive using 24-bit (I'm using WMA as losless/lossy)
- don't use cleaning/restauration filters at all

There are plenty of software w/ automated track cutting and naming (get's filenames etc. information from some internet database) ... automated cutting may give you headache so I suggest to record one side at a time and then cut it manually while recording the other side ... you still be able to use the auto-namig system ...


BTW, I'm using software based RIAA stage (which I programmed not long ago) w/ a DIYed flat pre-amp (which is prepared by the recommendations given for cardridge/turntable). I'm doin' it this way because of the RIAA stage in my Hi-Fi pre-amp is not very good by the specs and it also sounds a bit too bright (maybe partly because of the Technics BORON EPC205CMKIII cardridge, which is said to be a bit bright sounding but that is not an issue w/ software filter anymore). The RIAA filter is really accurate (~0.0006dB (44.1kHz) - ~0.0000003dB (192kHz) @ 20Hz-20kHz) and sounds really excellent/detailed/full/... compared to the one in my Hi-Fi pre-amp. I have also programmed a switchable (36dB/oct, < 20Hz) filter for to remove the rumble frequency @ ~0.55Hz.
Currently I'm building a hybrid RIAA stage where the lower frequency area (which needs a lot of gain in software implementation) is processed by a hardware RIAA stage and the higher area by software filter. I have already tested this but it needs something more to do so the accuracy becomes good enough.


jiitee