Vinyl to CD - again

[Gordon]

I'm sure we've had this discussion before but here goes - a friend [who is not really very technical] has decided that he wants his large vinyl collection, to which he is very attached, backed up on CD. But he wants to retain the vinyl sound!! I've explained the process and what needs to be done and that he has to acquire some hardware but, like many vinyl fans, he is most peturbed about losing sonic value. His collection is substantially made up of Rock and Jazz with some classical. His system is good with Naim amps and a Rega disc player - I don't know the cartridge - and sounds somewhat aggressive/edgy to me but he likes it that way. I don't know if the cartridge/amp was ever optimised or tested. Is there a test LP one can get these days?

Unfortunately he has read a lot of rubbish on the internet about the conversion process which has not helped!! He's become engrossed in RIAA correction and its accuracy for example!! What he hears when playing vinyl appears to satisfy him but won't be convinced that that is what the electronics will capture - it's intended to do that at 192/24 if there is a box that will do that at reasonable cost. The resultant files could then be played back through a DAC of course but that involves more expense.

Does anyone have any advice born of experience, particularly the conversion hardware needed for 192/24 and then some software [or hardware?] to convert to 44.1/16 and CD. We want to do this once only!!

[Dave2002]

I am sure that there will be people over at the AoS forum who could help - ask Marco - or look at this thread, and take it from there - http://theartofsound.net/forum/showt...=ripping+vinyl

[John Wright]

I went on to the AoS site and then attempted to navigate away from the thread in question, I think I clicked the their forum home page, MacAfee suddenly came up and said there was Trojan on the PC and I followed their instruction to restart while it removed the Trojan, which it did (well the screen said so) just as the PC was shutting down.

That's just a cautionary warning from me, might not have been a real threat but when the Macfee screen comes up, well, I'm not going to ignore it.

[gurnemanz]

Just my method which might or might not be useful. I have a good CD recorder (Pioneer PDR 609), quite a few years old now but still working well, onto which I can transfer LP and audio cassette. It is mentioned on this site in the context of vinyl ripping. You can of course just keep the CD as it is, undoctored and with no track division. (I use the same re-recordable CD again and again.) I put the CD in my laptop, rip the tracks to wav format and then use a commercial program called Magix Audio (reviewed here). You can declick, dehiss etc as little or as much as you wish or not at all, and then insert track markers (this can be fiddly because it sometimes recognises silences that are not track boundaries) and then burn to CD. The process takes a little time but I have done about 20-30 with pretty good results.

I have only bothered to do it with recordings which I am fond of and aren't available on commercial CD.

[Flosshilde]

I've been thinking of starting a thread about this, but hadn't got anything nearly as technial in mind - I was intending to ask if the turntables that will connect to a computer, or even transfer direct to a CD, were any good or worth the money. But I think they will be seen as very low-end judging from some of the comments here

[johnb]

I've done this with about half a dozen LPs but I doubt whether my method will be helpful to others.

I decided to do it as well as I could with my existing resources so:

I carefully oiled the bearing on my old Rega Planar 3 and connected it, via a phono pre-amp, to my Meridian G92 (tuner, disc player, preamp). I then used the digital out (which is intended for Meridian active speakers), set to 96/24 (I think the only digital out options were 48/24 or 96/24).

This I fed into my PC via an ASIO capable external soundcard and recorded the LPs using SoundForge (which I happen to have) but I could just as easily have used Audacity, which is free.

Sound Forge has a number of restoration and glitch removal tools, each with multiple settings, but before using those I did a quick visual scan for any very large spikes, which I corrected using the tool that substitutes data based on the immediate surrounding data. I then used the 'automatic' restoration facilities to remove any crackle, clicks and noise. I found the settings needed a fair amount of trial and error so as to, say, minimise any degradation to the audio, especially to the transients. If the settings were not correct the software could actually introduce mysterious 'bumps', so I suggest that anyone using restoration software should try a variety of settings and compare the results. Finally I split the files into tracks.

I could have left the final files as 96/24 (which my Squeezebox Touch can easily cope with) but I resampled some as 48/24.

(As I play most of my music via a Squeezebox Touch I didn't need to convert the files to 44.1/16 and burn them to CD.)

After doing around six LPs I decided life was too short to do more, especially when most of the recordings were readily available on CD at reasonable prices.

[clive heath]

Like others above I am still in the business of converting LPs to digital, but have chosen to keep CDs out of it.

You can get a lot of stereo WAV files on a 500 Gb storage disc once you have filled up your 500 Gb lap-top ( mine's an Acer Aspire).

Assuming you have a decent deck you can buy the equivalent of my ancient Pro-Ject Phono Box SE e.g.

http://www.fidelitysoundandvision.co.uk/pro-ject-phono-box-mmmc-147-p.asp?gclid=CPvelY22m7YCFRDKtAodhHsARQ

which accepts the phono output from your cartridge and matches to Moving Magnet or Moving Coil giving RIAA equalisation and producing a phono output.

A simple dual phono to stereo jack plug will feed your lap-top in which you have installed Magix Audio Cleaning, for example, using the record facility.
Once you have the tracks in your computer you can clean up, label tracks etc.. at your leisure. Keep the labelling simple to start with. There are plenty of library systems which I have too few LPs to need as yet.

Of all the applications available, I use Magix Audio for recording and some cleaning and X-OOM ( I bought a disc so cannot vouch for the downloads, can anyone else do so?) for click removal and some equalisation. The click removal uses an interpolation system as "Sound Forge" does.

You can hear the results of my recent efforts at

http://www.cliveheathmusic.co.uk/vinyl.php

If you like what you hear then feel free to contact me and maybe I can help further.

[Dave2002]

I went on to the AoS site and then attempted to navigate away from the thread in question, I think I clicked the their forum home page, MacAfee suddenly came up and said there was Trojan on the PC and I followed their instruction to restart while it removed the Trojan, which it did (well the screen said so) just as the PC was shutting down.

That's just a cautionary warning from me, might not have been a real threat but when the Macfee screen comes up, well, I'm not going to ignore it.

John,

I have contacted the people at AoS. They did have a problem a while back, but they think they've cleared it now. The previous problem seemed to particularly affect users who were using Chrome as a browser, and after the AoS people cleared the problem they recommended clearing the browser cache. I hope it's not a recurring problem. The previous problems may have arisen for two reasons (at least?). Firstly, hotlinking to images on some sites which appear not to be so reputable. The advice given was to link to sites such as Photo Bucket or Image Shack, which they believe are more reliable. Secondly, the site was "upgraded" to make it usable by Tapatalk, and that seems to have introduced some bad scripts at one stage. The faults that introduced then were corrected.

I did ask around that time what Tapatalk is, and what benefits it provides. Apparently it's a tool which makes forum access more powerful on some mobile devices. I personally haven't felt the need to install it on any of my mobile devices, and possibly it's more trouble than it's worth. Some forums (not only AoS) seem to think it's a good thing to have. Perhaps there's a lesson for us on this forum, which otherwise appears to use very similar software as a base.

I'll post a link to Tapatalk here - http://www.tapatalk.com/ and others can decide whether it's useful and whether this site should be enabled for it, or not.

[Dave2002]

Returning to the original post, there's probably nothing wrong with using 192/24 to capture the LP sound, but it's quite likely that there won't be any significant difference if 48/16 or even 44.1/16 is used. My understanding is that the bit depth and sampling rate for CDs should be adequate, at least regarding noise levels and frequency response, but of course others may find that there are differences. I think it's quite easy to get 24 bits nowadays with even quite cheap converters, though higher sampling rates may still require more effort and expenditure.

Working at higher sampling rates may .... may .... permit a certain amount of processing of the audio files which could clean up the sound - but that could be subjective. I do believe that different ADCs - and different DACs used in the chain could affect the sound quality.

Also some very basic things may get in the way, even with CD quality - such as induced hum, interference etc. This could be much more noticeable than any effects due to different bit depths and sampling rates. It's important to use screened cable, and to keep signal cables away from mains, and avoid earth loops. All basic stuff, which I am well aware that our OP will know about.

There are devices such as this one from Project which do the equalisation, but they cost more than some basic ADCs - http://www.tesco.com/direct/project-...FaLHtAodfCQApA

I don't know whether it's essential to do the equalisation before digitising. It might be possible to do the equalisation in the digital domain with the output straight from the cartridge. Arguably that might have the advantage that different equalisation curves could be tried out. Otherwise it should still be possible to make adjustments to the equalisation curve if the digitised data used a standard curve having been generated by a devices such as the Project one.

There may be devices available which handle different equalisation curves, but they are very likely to be specialist and more expensive.

My gut feeling is that it is probably best to do most of the equalisation in the analogue domain first, because of the low signal levels involved, and the fact that there are devices available which are specifically designed to do that.

PS: There are also devices such as this one - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Creative-X...item51a72ff461 I used to use a CD quality 16 bit Creative Sound Blaster external card with my PC for recording line level signals - with quite good results. Second hand ones of those should still be available cheaply, or indeed the later 24 bit models. Devices like these should work with the output of a suitable pre-amp. Note that it is important to check output levels though - I recently tried to connect a device which was completely incompatible with what it was attempting to drive - I think it may have been a T-amp - and there was no audible output.

My external ADC was something like this one - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Creative-T...item3380cdc0fd I'm surprised they're still around, and that this one is described as new. I need the drivers for mine, which are apparently now hard to get hold of.

[Hornspieler]

Just my method which might or might not be useful. I have a good CD recorder (Pioneer PDR 609), quite a few years old now but still working well, onto which I can transfer LP and audio cassette. It is mentioned on this site in the context of vinyl ripping. You can of course just keep the CD as it is, undoctored and with no track division. (I use the same re-recordable CD again and again.) I put the CD in my laptop, rip the tracks to wav format and then use a commercial program called Magix Audio (reviewed here). You can declick, dehiss etc as little or as much as you wish or not at all, and then insert track markers (this can be fiddly because it sometimes recognises silences that are not track boundaries) and then burn to CD. The process takes a little time but I have done about 20-30 with pretty good results.

I have only bothered to do it with recordings which I am fond of and aren't available on commercial CD.

I fully endorse gurnemanz's post.

I have been using Magix Audio Cleaning Lab for 6 years now and have all my CDs, both commercial and personal, vynils, (some pre-electric), LPs, open reel tapes, cassette tapes and live broadcasts safely stored on my 1 TB detachable hard drive.
I can use the Magix audio wave files for straight audio reproduction, copying to other media, combining recordings or what have you.
The facility to edit out clicks, motor rumble, surface noise and unwanted coughs, bumps, wrong notes etc are simple enough for even a luddite like me to understand.

An inexpensive product which can do as much as all your prestigious hi fidelity audio equipment at a fraction of the price.

Go for it!

Hornspieler.

[Gordon]

Thanks to all who replied. The software packages mentioned will be explored!

My friend's real concern is the quality of the ADCs used, of those found none of them provide any useful specifications. A few back of the envelope calculations shows the challenge faced by a designer when ultimate "audiophile" performance is looked for [we are talking about a confirmed vinylite here!]. For example, I can't believe that the sampling clock stability required is remotely met in a PC or laptop. Computers are notoriously electrically noisy too so an external hardware converter is needed - clean-up once secured in the digital domain. They work of course but how many of the 16, or worse, 24, bits captured are music and how many sheer rubbish. The there is LP surface noise.........

[Dave2002]

Thanks to all who replied. The software packages mentioned will be explored!

My friend's real concern is the quality of the ADCs used, of those found none of them provide any useful specifications. A few back of the envelope calculations shows the challenge faced by a designer when ultimate "audiophile" performance is looked for [we are talking about a confirmed vinylite here!]. For example, I can't believe that the sampling clock stability required is remotely met in a PC or laptop. Computers are notoriously electrically noisy too so an external hardware converter is needed - clean-up once secured in the digital domain. They work of course but how many of the 16, or worse, 24, bits captured are music and how many sheer rubbish. The there is LP surface noise.........

I believe it's possible to spend £000s on ADCs and DACs. Only the really dedicated, seriously rich or follhardy will probably bother. Are the LPs otherwise unobtainable on CD? If they are obtainable on CD, then in theory the recording companies should be able to do a better job of making recordings available, though that's not always the case, particularly if the master tapes (somewhat older analogue recordings) have deteriorated.

I suppose it could be worth spending £1000 to get first class performance by someone who really cares, and wants the best possible digital master in case the LPs become unplayable. Otherwise why not settle for "good enough" and keep playing the LPs if the vinyl sound is really that important?

[OldTechie]

I have not tried digitising any LPs, but I do have some odd experiences with higher bit rate material. When I say odd I mean that, to me, they were very unexpected.

My hearing now stops dead a 11 KHz. Except on very quite passages there is no logical reason that I should be able to hear any difference between 24bit 96 k sample rate and 16 bit/44.1. However, being interested in these things I have now bought a few items from The Classical Shop where if you buy the 24/96 version you can also get the 16/44.1 and an mp3 version for free. I'm sure I can hear the difference. Because my DAC up-samples both to exactly the same sample rate (not related to either of them), I'm pretty sure it is not something to do with the DAC performance. I can only think that it is the filtering in the down-sampling that is at fault.

Looking at the embedded metadata in the FLAC files (thank you dbPoweramp) I can see what was used to down-sample. I see Sadie, Pyramix and Avid ProTools (which tell me that it was done by the original record producer, not by The Classical Shop.) I think it is likely that these all do a decent job, especially as the Pyramix would have started at 32bit floating point/352.8kHZ so both my versions were down-sampled.

I have done ABX tests on these and I cannot reliably produce a result that says I can hear any difference (after carefully matching the levels - they rarely match as delivered.) I can look at the waveforms and find places where I can see clipping on one version and not the other. Doing an ABX test on these sections I still can't produce a result that proves I can hear the difference.

So if I can't prove that 24/96 is different using an ABX test, why should I think I can hear any difference?

The first one I bought was Julia Fischer playing some Russian violin concertos. I had listened on the web site, and was a bit unsure about the audio quality - but I blamed it on the compressed feed. I then downloaded them in increasing order of file size. I started listening to the mp3 whilst downloading the CD quality lossless version. I really did not like what I had bought very much. I listened to the CD quality version, and thought it sounded much the same as the mp3. Finally, I listened to the 24/96, and found I could listen to it quite happily, though I still don't really like the sound. I think the problem is that it was mic'd up for surround sound rather than for stereo, and that I find the sound of DPA microphones a bit clinical and hard, so it is a recording that does not meet my personal preferences. However, the fact that the higher bit rate converted it to a recording I could enjoy convinced me to try some more.

I bought a Tilson Thomas/San Francisco SO Mahler 4. The recording quality is much to my liking. The opening flute passage on the CD quality sounds like a really good recording of a flute, but on the 24/96 it sounds like a flute. I think it might be the slight breath sounds being somehow more attached to the notes. Similarly on a bass fiddle, the bowing sounds seem to belong to the same instrument as the notes. I wonder whether this is all to do with group delay issues in the down-sampling filters.

So back to my ABX tests - I think the problem is that they encourage you to listen to the technical quality and try and judge it. But it is the music we want to listen to and enjoy.

I'm still having trouble believing I can hear the difference. I intend to devise a double blind test which does not rely on comparing two versions by switching between them. I think the requirement is to listen to a whole symphony, and then judge which of three known qualities it was. That means building a plugin for Foobar2000 that randomly plays different versions when I choose a piece of music without telling me which it has selected.

All this is to say that I'm not sure you can do a 16/44.1 disc recording that will satisfy your Vinyl-appreciating friend. I suspect that the quality of the ADC is at least as critical as the DAC. There are units that output both data rates simultaneously at high quality. You'll find proper specifications on the Benchmark site, but the price of their 2 channel ADC is £1600 or so with a USB connection.

The other great disadvantage with all the digital formats is that they do not come with a nice 12 inch cardboard easily readable set of information! CD covers go half way, but once you use a server its all a bit haphazard.

[David-G]

I have had a similar requirement, to transfer recordings from reel-to-reel tape, audio cassette and VCR cassette to my computer. It seems to me that the main requirement here is an analogue to digital converter. A well known and reputable hi-fi shop in London recommended that I get the UCA202 by Behringer (see here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Behringer-UC.../dp/B000KW2YEI). They told me that this is extremely good, and as good as anything if one does not want to spend mega-money. I do plan to get one of these.

[PJPJ]

For those not wishing to transfer via computer a CD recorder may be a solution.

http://www.stoneaudio.co.uk/?product=yamaha+cdr-hd1500+hdd+digital+audio+recorder

I have one of these, not used since I adopted a network player, but, as it works like a tape recorder in a sound system it's fairly easy to get used to.

Put on an LP, press record on the machine and it records to HD in real time. During recording you can create tracks, or you can split the LP side after it's recorded onto the HD.

A couple of buttons pushed after recording dumps the file onto a CD if you want one.