[clug] Digitising vinyl records

[Eyal Lebedinsky]

On 13/02/17 18:51, Mike Carden wrote:
> IIRC (and I really have not checked), Peter Chubb gave a talk at LCA in
> 2005 about turning a vinyl record collection into a digital one.
>
> At the time I was fresh off being a Technical Liaison Officer for Panasonic
> Australia and high quality turntables were a thing I knew a bit about. In
> fact I had spent years servicing turntables at that point. The Technics DJ
> direct drive beasties were much in demand. So I nodded through Peter's
> presentation.
>
> Fast forward to 2017.
>
> I have a small collection of vinyl records that I'd like to listen to.

I went through this process almost 4 years ago. My experience is this:

1) Having to listen to all of those records was a real joy, some I forgot how much
I like them.

2) As good as I looked after my records, as LPs go the quality is nothing like
a CD. This collection (only about 200 records) are just the ones that I did not
replace with CDs in the preceding decades. I am mostly happy with this approach.

3) People may get into the technical issues of cleaning the audio and splitting
the tracks. I did not do that because I never listened to individual tracks
anyway, and the scratches etc. are very much how I remember these records.

4) How good is your hearing? How quiet is your listening environment?
Invest in hardware only up to the level that you can actually experience.

> Where can I buy a reasonably good turntable with decent speed control, a
> pretty good cartridge and stylus and a roughly OK calibrated counterweight?

I still have my reasonably good turntable, ran it through my sound system preamp
and fed it to the line input of my humble PC.

Do you really want to buy a new turntable just for this one-off task?
Maybe you plan to get back into the new vinyl craze.

cheers

-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au)