LPs. Forgot how good they sound....

[Navy Chief]

After years of collecting dust on a shelf, I hooked up my turntable to our surround sound system downstairs. It dawned on me the other day that I'd seen a Phono input on the back of the amp.

Well, I put on Billy Joel's "Songs In The Attic" half-speed mastered LP.

Yes, for you young folks, there were actually recordings BEFORE cds.............

I am rockin'!!!

NC

[Panther_99FS]

Chief,
There are "turntables" that you buy that hook directly into your computer so you can record/transfer all those old .33s & .45s into MP3 files :mixedsmi:

[Navy Chief]

Thanks Panther!

Yep, my sister has one. Right now I can't spend the money on one. But the turntable I have is a good one, made by NuMark. My stepson gave it to me years ago, when he used to "mix" music. I have hooked it up to my computer, and was able to record to hard disk, but it is much more complicated than I want to deal with!

NC

[cheezyflier]

the thing is, when you go from vinyl to mp3 format the sound gets "clipped".
you lose the warmth of the vinyl. you still have the music, and it still sounds ok, but the lows are not as low and highs not as high.

[Navy Chief]

the thing is, when you go from vinyl to mp3 format the sound gets "clipped".
you lose the warmth of the vinyl. you still have the music, and it still sounds ok, but the lows are not as low and highs not as high.

I can believe that. CDs do not, as you say, have the warmth of an LP. If any of you have never listened to a LP played on a decent turntable and sound system; there is a difference.

NC

[Tako_Kichi]

MP3 is a very lossy format and yes you will lose 'information' in the conversion. If you record the LP to WAV format it is at the same quality as CD and even then you lose some of the 'warmth' as others have noted.

The only advantage of MP3 is the file size and portability but I will take quality over file size any day.

[Moses03]

You know what I miss about vinyl records? Going into a music store and browsing the cover art. Used to spend hours going up and down each row looking at everything. Just not the same with those little plastic jewel cases for cds.

[PRB]

the thing is, when you go from vinyl to mp3 format the sound gets "clipped".
you lose the warmth of the vinyl. you still have the music, and it still sounds ok, but the lows are not as low and highs not as high.

Not necessarily. If you spend the time and effort to do it properly, the recording is not clipped and the “warmth” is preserved. If I could ever get my brother to get on this board, he could explain it. He is in the process of doing this for his thousand or so LPs, and he is an absolute fanatic when it comes to sound quality. It can be done.

[Navy Chief]

You know what I miss about vinyl records? Going into a music store and browsing the cover art. Used to spend hours going up and down each row looking at everything. Just not the same with those little plastic jewel cases for cds.

I know what you are saying. Take, for example, Rare Earth's Live LP. They made it look like a briefcase, with the opening fold as the closing cover. So clever. Am sure there are lots of other great ones out there. I mentioned that one, as I was playing it today. The live version of "Get Ready" is awesome on LP.

The following Youtube video is only 7:31 of the song, which is much longer. But you can tell whoever posted this, it's from a LP that is not in good shape. There's often some pops and cracks, but you can really hear them in this recording. But to hear the recording directly from a LP on a good system is incredible.

TQ_qdaPLIrI

and I found Part 2

__QMpfTAxGk

NC

[PRB]

Ok, so it's not easy, and you have to be somewhat of a geek to do this, but what the heck, who among us isn't? I've heard the results. It works...

*************

Hi Paul...
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Well, the first thing is that I am constantly learning how to do it better as I go so the process changes as time goes on. Step one is to get a NEW cartridge for the turntable. I got a couple of Shure M97E cartridges (one for a spare back-up, there getting hard to find). This made a really big difference in the sound quality. The fact that it comes with a new stylus helps to.

Step two is a good pre-amp. I'm using my Niko pre-amp. The turntable hooks up to the phono in and the pre-amp's main output-1 is hooked into the M-Audio USB interface to the computer. This unit is 8 channels in and 8 channels out but you can use any good quality interface to the computer. (NOT the sound card!) The biggest boost to the sound quality came when I started using the M-Audio box.

Step-3 is an easy to use, good quality-recording app. I use Sound Forge.
<o:p></o:p>
So here is how I do it. I set Sound Forge to recording, I drop the tone arm down into the end of the previous track and let it play through the quiet leader into the next song and all the way to the end of that song, through the leader again and into the next song before I stop recording. Now I have a quiet reference at the beginning of the song and at the end of the song. Do this for each song on the album making sure you have quiet reference before and after the song. This is for editing purposes.
<o:p></o:p>
Once I have all the cuts on the album recorded, I start editing. Again, high-end good quality editors are a must. I use Cool Edit Pro for de-noising, trimming and equalizing. I use Sound Forge for manual de-clicking (a really long process). I also use DC-7 a lot.
De-clicking can be done in both DC-7 and Cool Edit but I have found even a mild de-click setting just removes to much music so I do it manually using Sound Forge.
<o:p></o:p>
So the first thing I do in the editing process is pull up the WAV file in Sound Forge and use the paragraphic filter to remove all content below 20 hertz. This cleans up turntable rumble and low freq. surface noise then I save it. Next I magnify the waveform all the way up...Sound Forge now gives you a pencil tool and I start at the beginning and step through the entire WAV file looking for blips. When I fing one I draw it out making sure I follow the waveform as much as possible. This step is hard and takes a lot of experience. Most songs take about 7 hours to go through, much longer for really noisy records.

After saving I bring up the same song in Cool Edit. Here I normalize the song's amplitude. Next I use the Parametric to equalize the song. (dangerous operation!) Then the big part... De-noise. I select a part of the quiet lead-in and VERY aggressively de-click it with Cool Edit's de-clicker. I the use "Scientific Filters" to band-pass everything between 1000 hertz to 8.5 K-hertz. Next I go into noise filter and have it sample the quiet part I just processed. This is the needed noise reference the algorithm will use to de-noise the file. Select the entire file and de-noise it. Save it after this operation.

Next I trim everything before half a second in front of the song. Select the half-second quiet lead-in that remains and amplify it to zero. (Make it absolutely quiet). Next go to the end of the song and trim off everything after half a second beyond the last bit of musical data. Select a second or so of the "new" end of the song and use the "envelope" function to fade to absolute quiet. Now save the song.
Depending on the song and the label it's recorded on there may be more steps (RIAA curve correction in DC-7 for instance) but this is the basic process.

I will have to try writing this up better of line and send it as an attachment.
<o:p></o:p>
This is a start. It’s a complicated process.
<o:p></o:p>
See ya, Bob

*************

End Trans