dumb questions from an old guy

[AudGuy]

Some of this depends on what era your records have come from. Myself, I have a lot of records that predate digital and while these records can be quite nasty, they can also be very nice. But they are all from a completely analog reproduction chain and this can influence what you are doing. I find that capturing record sides is easier, but does not accommodate track-to-track changes in gain. If one wants to nursemaid gain settings, then changes will be required that may be minor, or they can be fairly significant.

 

I will test the first track of an album and determine what gain settings seem appropriate for any given album. Then while recording individual tracks I watch my gear closely for any significant changes in the tracks gain and if there is any, I will adjust things accordingly.

 

This procedure is not as tedious as it may sound and I believe will result in recordings that more closely replicate what is on the record. Some equipment will accommodate this technique more readily that others and is perhaps, that which separates the equipment. Part of what is being striven for is to reduce or eliminate any "clipping" events. Clipping is when gain levels are too high and exceed a threshold. We can control this and would want to achieve recording levels of sufficient gain without any clipping.

 

Audacity is quite suitable for this whole process and will show clipping events as quite evident red lines when the recording is viewed. Sometimes there will only be a few clipping events, and sometimes there will be many ... depends on how high gain control is set. This is all pretty normal recording technique and doing ADC is no different. 

 

Records though are subject to numerous problems which can become quite evident when capturing record playback. The most important being to CLEAN THAT RECORD ! How you choose to do that perhaps is not so important except that the cleaning will determine the results. If your cleaning technique is not rigorous enough then playback will make evident any debris that has not been removed. 

 

There are a number of highly regarded cleaning machines available all of which can cost significant money and in general, will produce quite good to outstanding results. Learning to use the machine to it's utmost abilities will produce the best results. However, I use a simple cleaner called a "Spin Clean". It is a plastic tank with rollers, brushes and cleaners that is a VERY manual process.  But, with patience and perseverance you can obtain results equal to most of the machines except maybe those with ultra-sonic cleaning.

 

Whichever method is used, the cleaning of the record will have more influence on your end results than just about anything else that you can do. It is possible to capture a record that is sufficiently well recorded so that the resulting files will sound like they originated as digital output files. They will sound exactly like the records that were used as the source.

 

The captured files ... Audacity can capture pretty much whatever you might want and I found that while 16 bit 44 kHz sounds quite good, increasing bit rate and frequency generally produced better results right up to 24 bits and 192 kHz. But those high rate files are huge so do keep that in mind when determining your capture rate. I chose 24 bits and 96 kHz and in the WAVE format as my default capture technique. A wave file is like a RAW camera image, totally devoid of any compression. If you want FLAC files and I do use FLAC as my playback library format then it is easy to convert/copy your existing WAVE files to whatever format you want to use. The main reason to use FLAC in the playback library is because while we can embed metadata (tag data) into a wave file, that is not normal and takes able editors and players to utilize wave files with tag data.  Whereas, flac has none of these problems.

 

A last consideration, once you have a wave file and a flac file of the same piece of music it should be listened to with a critical ear in order to determine whether you think there is a significant, or even any differences between the play audios. Under certain circumstances, I think a wave file can sound somewhat better than a flac file although, the differences are subtle and quite dependant on the originating music and it's engineering.

 

So, modest gear can produce very good copies of records and as always, better equipment will generally create better ADC conversions. I suggest getting started and copying some records using whatever is at hand or readily available. The process is tedious but the rewards are significant and one can always buy better equipment. Some records will even justify that expense.

 

But there is something special about ADC captures that creates a digital file that has many of the qualities exhibited by vinyl playback.