Article: Guide to Converting Analog Vinyl To Digital Files Using Windows

[mitchco]

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[Rat44]

Great article.

Hope it gets more people to give it a try.

You have shown that you do not need top shelf gear to get a good sounding rip.

I achieve listenable results using a Debut III with an AT 120E and Vinyl Studio.

 

Dennis

[jzahr]

I agree in that this is a very nice article. Also, great idea the proposed excercise. Thanks.

 

Regarding this:

 

Great article.

...

You have shown that you do not need top shelf gear to get a good sounding rip.

...

Dennis

 

We have to keep in mind that the Lynx used as AD is quality studio gear, priced 2200 euros (thomann store). I don't know if it is the best conversion available, sure there are other more expensive, but it is not a typical consumer device...

 

This rises the question of which part dominates the quality of the end result: the analog side (TT and phono preamp) or the AD converter?

 

It would be very nice to have, in adition to the already published comparison between this vinyl rip vs the comercial cd-rom rip, a comparison to a vinyl rip using the same TT and phono preamp used here but with a budget or "consumer" AD stage in a range of 100 to 300 euros (for instance a sound blaster or asus internal sound card or even usb or firewire external audio capture box)

 

Finally, I'm curious: how was the project phono preamp interfaced with the Lynx? Simple RCA to XLR adapter cable or there was an intermediate unbalanced to balanced converter box?

 

Regards,

 

Jorge

[jtwrace]

Chris,

 

What do you think of the Hilo?

[jtwrace]

Also, will you try the Channel D Seta on the second part for Mac?

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi Guys - This is Mitch Barnett's first feature article written for CA. I'm sure you're familiar with his CA Blog (Link). He will be writing a followup using Mac OS X with Amarra Vinyl and Pure Vinyl. Mitch is very skilled. We are lucky to have him aboard here at CA.

[russtafarian]

Enjoyed the write-up and learned a few new tricks. I've been ripping vinyl by connecting my phono preamp to a $150 Tascam DR-07 24/96 recorder then dumping the file into Audacity for editing. This is a lower cost approach capable of very good results. The limiting factor in my vinyl rips is the below the vinyl noise floor bearing noise of the SL1200 TT, not the recorder.

 

The IZotope software looks really cool. I'm going to look into that. Now all we need are software plug-ins to emulate the sound of favored high-end turntable & cartridge combinations (Linn + Koetsu, VPI + Benz, etc.). Great job and thanks.

 

Russ

[Efjay]

I'm curious if, and how, you separate tracks. I've used Soundforge to do it but I haven't ripped vinyl in a while.

[Bluedelity]

Regarding the which is which contest, I can't figure out which is which, but I definitely prefer the first part (and consequently all the even parts). Now I'm curious to learn which is which.

[JR_Audio]

Hi Chris

 

A very nice and clear written article from Mitch Barnett aka "Mitchco".

 

Juergen

 

PS: I will be listen to the samples when I am back home (on weekend).

[spdif-usb]

Nice article, but IMO it's worth noting that Decrackle shouldn't be seen as a tool that can magically turn a borked record into a new one. lol Also, letting the Declick feature run in automatic mode can kill transients, so because you don't want that to happen it IMO is always a good idea to declick everything in manual mode only (even though it takes alot of time and effort).

[mitchco]

Hi Dennis and Jorge, thanks for your comments.

 

 

This rises the question of which part dominates the quality of the end result: the analog side (TT and phono preamp) or the AD converter?

 

It would be very nice to have, in adition to the already published comparison between this vinyl rip vs the comercial cd-rom rip, a comparison to a vinyl rip using the same TT and phono preamp used here but with a budget or "consumer" AD stage in a range of 100 to 300 euros (for instance a sound blaster or asus internal sound card or even usb or firewire external audio capture box)

 

Finally, I'm curious: how was the project phono preamp interfaced with the Lynx? Simple RCA to XLR adapter cable or there was an intermediate unbalanced to balanced converter box?

 

Regards,

 

Jorge

The Lynx Hilo is a studio grade converter, and by one objective measure, about as transparent as they come. My point was to minimize the sonic signature of the line amp and A/D converter stage so that the character of the TT/cartridge/Tube phono preamp came through. Perhaps for the Mac version I will try a consumer A/D stage.

 

Re: how was the project phono preamp interfaced with the Lynx? I wired my own RCA to XLR cable (unbalanced) to keep it simple.

 

Happy Halloween!

[mitchco]

Hi Russ, Efjay, Bluedelity, Juergen, and spdif-usb. Thanks for your comments.

 

I'm curious if, and how, you separate tracks. I've used Soundforge to do it but I haven't ripped vinyl in a while.

 

Great question. Here is one way in Audacity to split a recording into separate tracks

 

Regarding the which is which contest, I can't figure out which is which, but I definitely prefer the first part (and consequently all the even parts). Now I'm curious to learn which is which.

 

Excellent, thanks for playing! At some point, I will follow up with which is which.

 

The IZotope software looks really cool. I'm going to look into that. Now all we need are software plug-ins to emulate the sound of favored high-end turntable & cartridge combinations (Linn + Koetsu, VPI + Benz, etc.). Great job and thanks.

Russ

 

Russ, I don’t think that is too far off. There is a software plug-in for emulating the sound of vinyl. In the pro audio industry, it is common to emulate the sound of vintage hardware tube preamps, processors, eq’s, even tape machines, with software DSP plug-ins as described in my sonic signatures article. The last time I looked, there are over 6,300 software plug-ins in KVR Audio's plug-in database.

 

Nice article, but IMO it's worth noting that Decrackle shouldn't be seen as a tool that can magically turn a borked record into a new one. lol Also, letting the Declick feature run in automatic mode can kill transients, so because you don't want that to happen it IMO is always a good idea to declick everything in manual mode only (even though it takes alot of time and effort).

 

spdif-usb, that was my concern as well. However, with the nifty feature of “output clicks/crackles only”, I can hear precisely what is being removed from the audio signal as I am only listening to the difference signal. The software’s guidance is, “the ideal setting should remove the most clicks without damaging the transients in the program material”.

 

Based on that guidance, I played around a bit with the settings and the defaults are quite good. So good in fact, I invite you to play our critical listening contest. If you feel the transients have been killed, then it should be easy to hear the difference between the vinyl rip and CD rip So does the “which one is which.wav” start with the vinyl rip or CD rip?

 

Happy Halloween!

[astrotoy]

I've been using Izotope RX2 for declicking my vinyl rips for a couple of years. I had hired a consultant to help me and we experimented and found that for my rips the default setting (5) was a bit too aggressive. We settled on 2.5 which works very well. I typically rip about 8-9 albums a day and batch process them for declicking so I can get the declicking done during the ripping and then overnight (declicking typically takes close to twice as long as the length of the files. For the occasional pop that doesn't come out with the declick, I use the RX2 in manual mode. I use Pyramix software for the ripping with a Mykerinos sound card and a PM Model Two for the ADAC.

 

Larry

 

Larry

[mitchco]

Hey Larry thanks for sharing your expertise, much appreciated. It's great to hear from someone that has had extensive experience. Did your experiment include the tool selection as well? Or was RX2 already decided upon?

 

What was the table, arm, cart? What type of music is being ripped? Thanks again for sharing.

 

Btw, did you try the vinyl vs cd, which is which?

 

Cheers, Mitch

[firedog]

Mitch-

 

As usual, great stuff.

 

I heartily recommend software based RIAA correction instead of HW based. It's more accurate.

 

Also I agree that declicking etc is fine if you do it gingerly. I generally leave a slight amount of the noise in the file, just to make sure I'm not overdoing the declicking and decrackling. Doesn't seem to do any harm to the sound this way.

[JR_Audio]

Hi Chris, Hi “Mitch”

 

I made a quick listen, but will do more on the weekend, when I am at home.

 

Which is which? My guess is that you have started with the Vinyl Rip, then CD-ROM, then Vinyl and ended with CD-ROM. You can reply via pm, in order to leave the result open to the public.

 

Is there a small mistake in your first uploaded file called “Declick 1 Min”, because this file is, compared to all the other files, reduced in level and in sonic quality? Maybe this is a file, where you have set the declick settings too high, because it has the lowest background noise, but also the lowest sound quality = highest lost of sound.

 

A thought from my side would be to make this test with a real analog recording. Sure, this Soundstream recording has a tremendous amount of dynamic and I appreciate this a lot, but it has had already a sharp anti alias filter in front of the AD converter at the recording and also an alias filter after the DA conversion when cutting the LP.

 

So the LP is coming from an already brickwall filtered Digital Medium with already two sharp filters that have been applied to the signal, before you convert it a third time with your Vinyl Rip. PS: There are also some 44 kHz and 88 kHz lines in your 192 kHz Analog Rip.

 

But as I mentioned in my first post, really a very nice article.

 

Juergen

[spdif-usb]

spdif-usb, that was my concern as well. However, with the nifty feature of “output clicks/crackles only”, I can hear precisely what is being removed from the audio signal as I am only listening to the difference signal. The software’s guidance is, “the ideal setting should remove the most clicks without damaging the transients in the program material”.

I know, but the problem with that is it's still only a tradeoff because, in order to keep all transients nice and alive, it forces you to leave some of the (soft) clicks in there. In spectrogram mode, iZotope RX Advanced 2 can let you manually zoom in on those remaining, harder to find clicks. As perfectionist as this may seem to some folks, from my own personal listening experience, walking the extra mile pays off well. Another hard effort IMO is to find (by always comparing them) the best sounding pressings of the music that you like, in mint or near mint condition and at an affordable price.

[ogs]

Hi Guys - This is Mitch Barnett's first feature article written for CA. I'm sure you're familiar with his CA Blog (Link). He will be writing a followup using Mac OS X with Amarra Vinyl and Pure Vinyl. Mitch is very skilled. We are lucky to have him aboard here at CA.

 

Hi Chris and Mitch.

 

This is a very interesting subject. The article touches on all the important points on the way to high quality needle drops. I have transferred vinyl to PCM for a few years and have some experience. To begin with I too used Audacity. Then I tried Audition and a few others. I got very good results (storing up to 24/96 depending on the AD used), but the time and effort it took to record an album, remove clicks, split and add meta data was unacceptable. Also too complex for a novice PC om Mac user I would think.

I've now used Vinyl Studio for the past 18 months http://www.alpinesoft.co.uk. VS has both Windows and Mac versions, Records at up to 24bit (or 32) /192kHz. Can use Asio. Sound quality is top notch Audiophile level.

 

My view is this: any article dealing with digitizing vinyl that does not point to Vinyl Studio as one of the top solutions is incomplete. I do not get how Mitch could miss Vinyl Studio when doing research for this article.

[wgb113]

Mitch,

 

Great write-up! Looking forward to the Mac version. Planning on spending this winter with this very same undertaking.

 

Bill

[coleb13]

When I've done this, I found it easier to record one entire side at a time and then use the software to break it into individual tracks. Particularly for live albums, I want each track to begin just after the previous track ended and that's easier to achieve this way. The exception, of course, is where the record is so damaged that the stylus gets stuck repeating part of the groove endlessly. In that case, you need to record up to the problem and then record the remainder of the side and use the software to glue them together.

[russtafarian]

My method for breaking out tracks in Audacity:

 

1. Load the recording of the entire side. For me this is a 24/96 PCM file from my Tascam recorder.

 

2. Identify the first album track in the waveform, highlight it and hit Edit > Duplicate to copy it to a new file below.

 

3. Repeat so that you have a separate music files for each LP track. Be sure to capture a few seconds from the tracks on either side for editing purposes. Type in track number and title for each file. This makes it easy to sequence the files for CD-R burns later on.

 

4. Edit the beginning and end of each track to get a tight start and clean fade (or tight stop of the track ends that way). A trick for editing the beginning is to cut the track about a tenth of a second before it starts and do a split second fade-in to the down beat. This gives the track a more organic-sounding start. Cutting right on the down beat can sound clipped.

 

5. Once all the tracks are edited, use File > Export Multiple to export all the files to whatever format and resolution you want. I export two sets; 24/96 FLAC for my music server and 16/44.1 PCM for CD-R. The PCM files are sequenced and labeled for a CD-R burn. I use Mp3tag to add metadata to the FLAC files.

 

Russ

[spdif-usb]

My view is this: any article dealing with digitizing vinyl that does not point to Vinyl Studio as one of the top solutions is incomplete. I do not get how Mitch could miss Vinyl Studio when doing research for this article.

I don't see why Vinyl Studio is necessarily so much better than any other decent recording software package (like, for example, Adobe Audition).

[coleb13]

Another edit you may want to perform is to apply a rumble filter (high-pass filter) to the file you have created. The idea is that if your file contains any sound energy at frequencies below 20 Hz it is mechanical noise from your record playing equipment and not part of the original recording and there is no point in having your electronics and speakers struggling to reproduce it later.

[astrotoy]

Hey Larry thanks for sharing your expertise, much appreciated. It's great to hear from someone that has had extensive experience. Did your experiment include the tool selection as well? Or was RX2 already decided upon?

 

What was the table, arm, cart? What type of music is being ripped? Thanks again for sharing.

 

Btw, did you try the vinyl vs cd, which is which?

 

Cheers, Mitch

Hi Mitch, my consultant recommended Izotope RX2. I had trial copies of a couple of $3K declick and denoisers and found that RX2 did as good or better a job at about 10% of the price. I didn't try any of the low cost solutions. My TT is a VPI HRX with Rim Drive with the VPI 12.6 arm and a Lyra Skala cartridge. I am ripping classical music, about 10,000 albums, mostly original British Decca (3000), original EMI (3000), and RCA Living Stereo, Mercury Living Prescence, Lyrita, Reference Recordings, Harmonia Mundi. BIS, Chesky and many others, including all of the Absolute Sound Super Disk recordings. So far I have ripped about 3000 records and prerecorded tapes - over 10TB worth.

 

I have digitized my relatively small (1200) CD collection in lossless FLAC and ripped my 150 or so SACD's by taking the analogue stereo output from my Oppo BDP-95 and feeding it into the PM Model Two.

 

Larry