Digitizing services in LA?

[Bob Loblaw]

Hello guys,

 

Does anybody know of some digitizing services available in SoCal? I live in Irvine, but assume I have a better chance of finding good quality output in LA. I have some Vinyl and cassette only recordings that I would like to preserve. Just that I don't have enough to justify buying and learning software and a high end converter and all.

 

Found one in San Diego but service was clearly amateurish and CD sounded awful. Didn't even know what I was talking about when looking into resolution options.

[17629]

You shouldn't have to spend a lot of money to do this. All you really need to do is get a stand alone, component type CD burner. Plug your phono preamp directly into it and record. Most people feel that recording this way is very accurate, in that its hard to tell the burned CD from the record. The ones I've done came out very good. If you find that you still need to do some processing after the CD is made, its very easy to rip the cd and process it with software.

 

Quite often, when you go out and buy costly gear that's meant for pro's, its much harder to use. So even if you end up getting stuff that's more capable, you'll probably get better results with gear that's easy to use. I think you'll be surprised by how good the results are if you do it yourself.

[Jabs1542]

If you want quality I would recommend an external ADC. I found that the basic unit found in a computer's sound card sounded much worse than the album itself, it lacked dynamics, the horns smeared, pumped bass, and other weird artifacts.

 

When I first recorded using a basic computer I was initially impressed, but then as I listened at higher volumes I began to pick the sound apart. And once you know what to listen for you discover that everything you record sounds bad - bummer. A stand alone ADC made all the difference.

 

There is another thread on this topic with some pretty good ADC recommendations for less than $200.

 

Final note: If you want it done right you will most likely be doing it yourself. People here on CA have talked about digitizing places that charge less than $10 per album, I have no idea how they could provide high quality at that price (it takes a good hour per album).

[Bob Loblaw]

Thanks guys,

 

HRT has the LineStreamer and is not too expensive. And Sony's Sound Forge I can get cheap enough I guess. Or I can just use Audacity.

 

Any thoughts about the LineStreamer?