Thread: turntables
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Old 25th March 2009
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IdOp IdOp is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: twisting on the daemon's fork(2)
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Interesting thread. You've gotten a lot of sound advice (pun intended) above. A few years ago I put all of my vinyl LP's onto CD-R media, a little over 100 albums all told. Generally I was quite pleased with the results. You hear what's on the record, clicks and all quite faithfully. Of course buying a CD, especially remastered, will usually give the best sound, although there are exceptions where vinyl is better.

I agree you should use something with a pre-amp built to go with a turntable. Equipment I used (all of it ordinary commodity stuff) was:

* Technics SL-Q2 turntable with Shure M95-HE cartridge

* Marantz 2220 stereo receiver (aux out goes to sound card line in)

* Creative labs sound card, Ensoniq 5880B [AudioPCI]

* Computer described in my profile.

I happened to go rather over-board cleaning the records, as I actually washed them all. This is very time-consuming and may have added little-to-nothing to the final quality. If your records are in pretty good shape (no mold) then what I'd recommend is getting a good carbon-fibre static-inhibiting brush (about $15-20 or so) -- that may be all you need.

I've attached some files that describe what I did re cleaning, and the equipment I used for that.

recordwash.tgz

A lot of that information was put together by googling the relevant subjects and trying find my own path through the suggestions and info that was available online at the time. The goal there was D-I-Y with cost minimization. In addition I also ended up writing over a dozen crappy shell scripts to manipulate the raw audio samples and make getting the stuff onto CD more routine.

Whatever you decide to do, be prepared that this can turn into a time consuming project, that may only get completed if it's a labour of love for the music.

Good luck!
Attached Files
File Type: tgz recordwash.tgz (7.0 KB, 88 views)
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