First of all, hi all to all audiophile (or non-audiophile) of the forums.

I thinks this forum will be probably the best place to ask this question. The topic says it all, I want to digitalize my full vinyl collection. The collection is mostly compromised of electronic music of various forms and shapes but not exclusive, I have a wide range of music from classical to jazz, and almost every thing (or will have at some point). BUT mostly I'm interested in digitalizing my electronic music records (from more abstract stuff to straight techno etc.) as these will be the hugest part and the first I will be selling or swaping. I tell this because maybe it does a difference in the best set up I need to this task.

Well, actually I want to set up the thing so I can record my vinyls the best way for the posterity, and not having to repeat the same more than once. For recording I'm using an "old" laptop (at least for now), the most important part is the audio interface probably, I've to buy a new one either firewire or USB-2, I've to buy a port-PCMCIA interface and both are the same price (USB-2 or Firewire). But USB-2 would be more usable for other things (external harddrives ie). I think USB interfaces used to give some problems, but with the new ones there wouldn't be much problems? I probably will buy it at http://www.turnkey.co.uk/ and will spend around 100-150 pounds. If possible I prefer the card to have DSP incoporated and with 2in/2out is enought. First dilema.

My turntable is a Technic SL1210-M3D, I think it's not longer produced, I'm not up to buy a new turntable so this is not questionable. But I have to buy a new needle & cartridge for this task. If the cartridge is designed for DJing the better so I can use it for that too. I'm up to spend a good money on this (but not thousands hehe).

Next steep, what I use between the turntable & the computer, I've 2 options: a phono pre-amp or a mixer. My current mixer is screwed (yes, I've to buy a new one TOO, damn) and it's not quite good, and compomises the quality A LOT. Also a phono preamp is relative cheap, around 30-40 € if I guess right. Well suggerences welcome, as well as special cables & stuff.

Last but not least, the software. For the recording I probably will use Adobe Audition (or ex-Cool Edit Pro), as I owe it allready and I think it's good enough. Know comesthe question on what options should I use, recording @ 16 or 24 bit, and what about frequency? Well I hope you can help me a little bit with this. As for enconding, I've thought of keeping 2 copies of the digitalized music, one in a lossless format, which I'll burn on DVDs, and other in a lossy format at a good quality. I don't care much about the space I'm willing to compress at good quality, also don't care much about how fast it does (the computer is a PIV 1,4 ghz, but probably next month I'm buying a new desktop which I'll use for this too, an AMD double-core one).

My take on the formats was:
- for lossy format - OGG; best quality (or almost) and much bigger support & development than MPC
- for lossless format - FLAC

the problem is that I wanted both formats to have the same tagging, as this will make the process of taggig for me (I could tag the lossless and then transcode it to the lossy one keeping the tag), but well, maybe it's something I can forget even if it's a little bit extra work.

Well, this sumarizes it all I think, help me with what you can.

Thanks!

Read this for a good 'how to get started' picture.
http://www.delback.co.uk/lp-cdr.htm
The recording/restoration topic has been covered so many times, on this forum and others (some others are more oriented to the details of that kind of audio processing than is this forum) that there are probably a dozen full books worth of discussion already available for reading. There are many takes on any particular point.

You need a decent phono preamp. The approaches that attempt to digitize without the correct equalization in the analogue domain are not widely accepted for good reasons.

Firewire has been a much better interface for audio than USB. I'm sure someone is trying to make things better with USB2 but I haven't heard about its good points yet. External drives also do better with firewire. Some laptops have high intrinsic noise that will impinge on your recordings regardless of the soundcard.

CoolEdit/Audition is excellent for such projects. It also accepts DX plugins that can add some useful facilities. Record and process in 32bit floating point and only resample to 16 bit as the last step. There can be some advantages to recording at higher sampling rates (search for 'alias' or 'aliasing image' here and on the audiomasters site) but none to processing at greater than 44.1kHz. Keep everything in .wav format until you will do no more processing, then convert to whatever other format may interest you for long term storage.

In addition to what Andy has already said, I have a couple of specific points to make:


Cartridges designed for DJ use are built to be rugged and survive abuse rather than give excellent sound quality. If you want to do this well and will be buying a new cartridge, I strongly advise you to get a good HiFi model, NOT a DJ type, preferably with an elliptical or fine-line stylus. Take a look at the ranges from the likes of Shure, Ortofon, Audio Technica.



Cheap phono preamps are not particularly good. They tend to be a bit noisey. You'll need to spend upwards of 60 Euros to get something decent. Take a look at the ProJect Phonobox and the NAD PP-1.

First of all, thanks to both you for taking the time to answer. I realize this question has been discussed thousands of times, my fault for not spending some time doing some research myself, apologies for that.

Anyway about some issues you rise:



I know, but I've allready an external USB HD, thas was one of the reasons that I wanted to pic a PCMCIA USB-2 port, as my laptop native ones only are USB-1 and some times is a pain, but I guess I can wait until I get a new computer which shouldn't take much longer.

I know about the noise, and is my case, at least with the integrated sound card, the solution is to not connect it to power net (sorry if this is not the correct word, english is not my native language), it's a shame but only solution at least. Maybe with an other audio interface won't happen, will have to try.



Well, I had in mind buying ortofon cartridges anyway, so I think it will be good enought.


About the rest, thanks for all the info, I'll spend a little bit more on the phono preamp then. Also reading the webpage you referred me to, I hope this enlight me a little bit.

Thanks again.

USB/Firewire will not be a dealbreaker. If you look hard enough you will find fine ADCs for each.

I strongly agree with Clive's comments about preamps. I wouldn't care much about the frequency response tolerances - compared to what you're recording a +-0.5db deviance from ideal RIAA is laughably small - but the noise levels WILL be audible on a lot of preamps. Based on the specs I've seen, you may need to shell out $200 or more to get a preamp that is dead silent. I spent $50 on mine and it was servicable, but I had to replace the power supply (which lowered the noise floor by 10db!)

Your exact SL1200 may not be made anymore but SL1200s in general are still sold in vast quantities. Some audiophiles swear by them and KAB makes a heavily modified SL1200 with all sorts of audiophile tweaks.

You'll probably want to score a vacuum cleaner of some sort. This might be the most expensive thing you'll buy. You may also want to buy a test LP (the Hi-Fi News one is canonical) to tweak your setup, get a protractor and tracking force gauge, etc. I bought all these things in the process of digitizing my LPs.

The Alesis MasterLink 9600 is specifically directed at tasks like this. I've had mine for a couple of years now, and it has performed admirably.

http://www.alesis.com/product.php?id=4

I have spent the past several month converting my Album collection using CoolEditPro and I would highly reccommend it for this type of work. My setup is somewhat different in that I had my dual turntable connected up to an amp with the output from the amp going into the line-in on my sound card(audigy2-zs). The resulting wav files were of a very good quality. On app I have recently added to the mix which has made the work easier is LP Ripper. Its splits the wav file(a full or one side of an album) into seperate tracks automatically. Now while it does not always do this perfectly it is quite easy using the "Trim Tracks" option to adjust the track correctly. It also allows you to encode the wav files to mp3(Lame) directly if needed as I do.

On comment by andyH intrests me regarding sampling rate advantages "none to processing at greater than 44.1kHz". I have recently upgraded my sound card to an X-Fi music xtreme. I notice when recording I can use a sampling rate up to 96kHz. To date when recording my albums I have always used the 44.1kHz rate. If there are no advantages to be had in upping the sampling rate what purpose is there to the higher rates or are they for use with different types of projects. While I keep a copy of my wav(album) files ultimately they end up as mp3's on my iriver mp3 player.

There is more than one issue in considering higher sampling rates. I was addressing only the specific one of processing audio destined for CD. The one and only sampling rate that can be written to audio CD is 44.1kHz. The question was about the advisability of processing at a higher sample rate, which eventually must be downsampled to 44.1 in order to write to CD-R.

Whether or not there may be any value to higher sampling rates for other media is not straightforward. this is an area of major controversy, especially in the commercial audiophile market which would dearly love to sell a lot more expensive equipment.

Evidence strongly suggests very few people can hear anything at a higher frequency than can be totally captured at CD rates but there is some evidence (not well verified) that people can perceive and respond to music containing higher frequencies, under fairly limited conditions. This perception may be via bone conduction rather than the "normal" auditory pathways and people apparently are not consciously aware that the higher frequencies exist. Most music does not contain much in the way of higher frequencies anyway. When it does it is difficult to capture and impossible to reproduce from most home audio systems.

Note that I did say there may be an advantage to recording at a higher sampling rate, to avoid aliasing images, but not to processing the recording (declicking, noise reduction, etc.) at a higher rate.

For the sound card I'd reccomend the Echo Audio Indigo IO. Maybe it's overkill in the audio specs and stats, but it's not that expensive.

All sound cards (even, well especially pro ones) will have better SNR specs at 44.1khz than at 96khz. So that's a big plus for 44.1. However the noise difference is not going to matter unless you are recording at an extremely quiet level (-30db peaks or so).

AndyH, thank you for the snyopsis regarding the sampling rates. When you have equiptment that can work at a higher spec the temptation is normally to use the higher spec especially if one does not fully understand the ins and outs. However as you point out the reality of using higher rates may not be obvious to the human ear. Cheers.