I saw one today. Does anyone have guess as to what it is?

Armor All. It works great on your '70s vinyl top!

Are you talking about something like this?

http://www.amazon.com/Ion-ION-ITTUSB-05-Turntable/dp/B000MUDI9S/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1? ie=UTF8&s=musical-instruments&qid=1226859734&sr=8-1

Turntable with built-in preamp, A/d converter, output to USB port. Looks like an easy* way to transfer records to the digital domain.

I think that there are some models that "play" the record at higher than normal speed, so that the record can be "ripped" in less time.

* but not the highest quality

BSW appears to stock a higher quality device:

http://www.bswusa.com/proditem.asp?item=T90USB

The Amazon link is it exactly! It never occurred to me that someone would come up with this. Now, all we have to do is head over to 6th Avenue Records for a replacement RCA stylus.

With a good stylus, maybe this thing would be fun! I know I've done the pre-amp, record to 44.1 @ 24bit audio, edit, noise reduce deal with good results, but it's got some setup involved.

Better for long sessions, if anything.

BTW: Removing pops is kind of easy. If the software does it, cool, but if not, try this for really good results:

Record the incoming audio, then zoom in to one of the pops. The simplest way is to just nip the peak off with the pencil type editing tool many programs have. If it's a fairly wide peak, look back or forward to a very similar bit of audio, and scribble in something that looks like it should be there. Works like magic!

The USB approach may circumvent a problem that I have had in the past... hum and noise induced when the turntable pre-amp was directly connected to the computer sound card.
My best set up involved connecting the low level output of the turntable to a pre-amp connected to a MD recorder (paused in "record" mode), then I connected the optical output of the MD recorder to the optical input of the computer sound card. This provided good isolation between the "noisy" computer and the very sensitive pre-amp circuit.

Missing: OMG, is that what the little pencil thingy in Audacity is for ? (slaps forehead)

http://www.knhcroots.9ax.net

seems they used some 'vinyl polishing'
on this site - looks different!

I don't know if that's what the intent behind it was, but I have to say it's unbelievably good when used just like I described.

All you have to do is get close, and you are golden. Many of the frequencies that are supposed to be there, will be, and that's notably different from just silence, or a clipped peak.

Thanks for the tip! I have a one-sided 78 record of Feodor Chaliapin singing "Song of the Volga Boatman" (Victrola #88663) that has a crack extending about 1 inch in from the edge..."scratch removers" that I have tried only reduce it to a dull thump, and my attempts to just cut out the "pops" were less than satisfactory. I will try the pencil!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feodor_Chaliapin

On a related subject, I have been thinking about buying a record cleaning machine. These things tend to be a bit on the pricey side because they are specialty products that are not manufactured in high volumes. These cleaners are different than the velvet brush dry cleaners, which I already own. The record cleaning machines use a solution that contains surfactants in order to be able to reach the bottoms of the grooves. Velvet brushes scrub the grooves, and a vacuum cleaner simultaneously sucks away the used solution, which carries the residues and particles that were in the grooves.

DYI Vacuum cleaner?

http://www.teresaudio.com/haven/cleaner/cleaner.html

I use a similar DIY vacuum system to the one described in the link above. I wash with white vinegar applied with a lint brush, the kind with directional bristles. I use one side for the wash and the other side for the distilled water rinse cycles. I use the vacuum to clean the brush and to dry the disc after the final rinse.

The best automated declick software I've seen so far is Click Repair, developed by an Australian math professor. You can read about it here: http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/~briand/sound/ Before discovering Click Repair I used the declick tools in Adobe Audition, fixing most of the clicks one at a time so as not to do damage to the music. I'd sometimes work for DAYS on a single track! Click Repair is in a league of its own. Saves tons of man-hours once you get the feel of it. It's the closest thing to a magic bullet I've found so far. Works well even with brass, one of the toughest things to declick without ripping up the audio like a buzz saw. Best $40 I ever spent.

Nice link Scott. I had bumped into this guy a while back. Our family had a recording done on one of those Do it yourself record cutter things. It was a 78, and it had been played enough on older gear (record grinders) to have very significant noise.

They dubbed it to cassette, on a more modern turntable, and sent it to me. I digitized that and man, it was horrible! It was almost impossible to hear the person singing.

I scoured the net, at that time, looking for a free trial or two of some noise reduction tool. Ended up with what I think is that guys software, on the trial.

Since it was a one shot deal, I went for the trial and ended up using a combination of the noise reduction. If this is the program I'm thinking of, it allowed you to sample a noise profile, from an otherwise quiet portion of the recording, then apply that to the body of the recording, for decent results.

I did that, then used inversion and some creative eq, to subtract some frequencies from the result, leaving me with decent enough sound to identify the person. My mother in law cried when she heard it. Had been years...

Took a long damn time though.

With all the computer power we have these days, we can do stuff in frequency / time domain. Sure seems to me, we could display the audio visually as a 3D model, then go through and select sounds that we don't want, and play the rest.

Somebody, some day is gonna do this.

It should also be possible to highlight a particular instrument, qualify it's harmonic characteristics, and isolate it from the rest too.

Anyway, I'm rambling because I like this stuff, and if this is the same software I used, it's good stuff indeed. Back then, nothing else even came close on the intense noise reduction.

How come we don't hear so much brass these days? Man, a nice horn, played loud, crunched down, and mixed well with punchy vocals has a lot of appeal. Sigh...

Back on topic: Do your sampling at 24 bit, if you can. Having the extra head room really helps! Vinyl has one odd property that I don't think other formats have, and that is the effective dynamic range runs to about 80db, but that range can slide up and down through a 120db or so window! It's like turning the volume up and down, by way of analogy.

This means your serious scratch can deliver a sound outside the 80db window, and that will get clipped at 16bit audio, making recovery more difficult.

If you turn the input volume down, it's possible to squeeze it all into 16bit audio, but then resolution is lost on quiet portions of the recording.

I think 16bit is good for 100db, 24 bit is good for what? 120, 140db? Not sure, but it's more than 100, and just the thing for cracks and pops.

When everything is done, you normalize, then downsample to 16bit for mp3, CD recording, and write the 24bit files too. I'll often do that with a data track, so I have a playable archive that when it's in a computer, gives me the original 24 bit recording data for later when software improves!

Yes, recording at 24 bit is a good idea for headroom purposes. I think probably most people's setups have no gain control on the analog side of the soundcard, so if you ingest at 16 bit, everything over 100% will be clipped. Going in at 24 bit not only preserves the integrity of the loud pops you'll remove later, but it really helps with hot 45s too. Some singles were cut surprisingly loud!

"I think probably most people's setups have no gain control on the analog side of the soundcard"

Perhaps I am missing the point here, but all windows OS that I have seen do contain a record mixer. Double click on the speaker icon in the taskbar to bring up the playback mixer panel... under "options" on that panel click "properties" to set up and view the record mixer panel.

It's all about the headroom on the input end. The chain is vinyl stylus to pre-amp, to computer sound in.

That sound in has 100db of input, with some kind of noise floor, maybe 10 - 20db or so, and that's at 16 bits. If you go 24, then that input can have more than 100db, with a bigger floor too, but it's the absolute range of sound you can digitize, without maxing out the bits that is important, not so much the noise floor.

The pop can easily exceed anything that's supposed to be in the groove.

Another way to look at it is that perhaps the sound in is a line level kind of thing. So that's what a volt, Peak to Peak? So, you set the level such that the recording is 70 percent of that, thinking you are golden, then the *pop* hits you at 1.2 volts!

No analog damage, but the digitizer stops at 1.0 volts, meaning anything higher just doesn't get a unique number assigned to it, and therefore it's clipped.

The 16 bit remedy is to run the recording at say 50 percent, but now you've lost resolution on quiet passages that might come close to the noise floor.

24 bits gives more precision, which eventually equates into more headroom and resolution.

I think I might be mangling this, so I'll stop and just say 24 bit is the way to go!

(trust me)

"The USB approach may circumvent a problem that I have had in the past... hum and noise induced when the turntable pre-amp was directly connected to the computer sound card."

Rumble is the most notorious problem (technically part of "hum and noise") and is picked up by the styli/cartridge/tonearm and transmitted into the phono preamp. If the phono preamp does not have a rumble filter, it will be carried through to the recording right through the A/D converter. It is often inaudible unless you have a really accurate low end response requiring quality components able to reproduce the ridiculously low end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_measurement

Windows and sound cards. Most sound cards are worthless IMO.
To marry high fidelity audio to the computer, you need a pro sound card with balanced audio I/O. Anything less than that and you are at the mercy of the gobs of noise generated by the switching supply, numerous fans, and plethora of oscillators running at microwave frequencies. The USB direct input from a turntable probably works pretty well, but a more serious approach would be a broadcast quality phono preamp fed to a broadcast quality sound card that is either directly plugged into the bus or on a short firewire/usb2 cable.

The key to low noise has always been and remains the elimination of unbalanced high impedance components and wiring.

We recently had another thread on this board about these record digitizer devices. I haven't tested any of these units, but as a rule of thumb, it appears that most, if not all of these are designed for non-technical home users who just want to be able to hear their old records on an MP3 player or a CD player. As a result, I think that it is reasonable to assume that these things are engineered primarily to keep the price down.

If you already have a quality turntable and stylus, I would recommend trying those first. Just be sure that you properly ground your turntable to keep the hum pickup to a minimum. This is what I do, and I find that the results are fairly satisfactory. The biggest improvement that I could make at this point would be wet cleaning of the records, as described earlier in this thread.

Edit (add): I recommend going to the Amazon link that was posted at the beginning of this thread and reading the user reviews.

.......and also avoid using a record player with a Chuo Denshi cartridge! You see these on many newer "turntables" like you'd find at Office-Max or even Freddy's, you know, those cheap kitschy "retro" stereos that can also play 78s in addition to 33 and 45.......they're the kind with the cartridge permanently fixed onto a 100-pound tonearm with the bright red stylus thingy staring you right in the face.

Those are JUNK and (from experience; I ruined several of my favourite records on a Teac equipped with one, that I had when I was in high school) the sound quality is roughly equivalent to a really bad cassette recording. Oh yeah, the two-foot wide "universal" stylus (it can play 78s and LPs) works just like a plow through most LP grooves.

ALWAYS make sure the turntable you use has a detachable cart that can be replaced with a better one!! (FYI, I think the USB phonograph I saw at Freddy's recently may have this.)

Rumble is the most notorious problem (technically part of "hum and noise")

In my case it was just plain old 60 Hz hum... I found out later that the outlet that I plugged the turntable and scratch-built preamp into was on a different circuit than the desktop computer, so I suspect that I was the victim of a classic "ground loop".
Not only was it a different circuit, but it was not fed from the same "hot" line, so that a difference of 235 volts existed between the "hot" side of 2 outlets in the same room!

Aw just hook it up to a three phase circuit, that'll fix it!

Gotta clean cola out of my keyboard now.

Seriously, I do remember reading a studio design tip some time ago that said that for minimum hum, all circuits in a studio should be fed from the same phase. It is not unusual for the outlets in a single room of a commercial building to be fed from different phases of the power.

I must be a real dork. I just record from my stereo's turntable to my CD recorder on a RW disc, then burn that to a cd on my computer. Kind of primitive I know, but it meets the needs. I'm probably one of the few who own the cd recorder.

Yeah, but your CD recorder probably has a much better a-to-d converter than any internal sound card. Watch your levels as you record so you don't clip, and then rip your burned CD to your computer for any digital cleanup you may want to do. Not a bad compromise really. Sure it's nice to ingest at 24 bit, but if you're just doing pop music you'll be fine.

Yeah, the CD recorders are decent. 85db plus, from what I've seen.

Your average consumer grade, internal sound card is maybe 60 db, depending...

I've not sampled pro grade computer sound. The SGI I used to use for this was 90db, if you played by all the rules. (same power phase, good, short cabling, etc...)

Low end response is kind of lousy on some computer cards too.

Somebody should just combine the two, maybe incorporate DVD audio and call it good! No computer required. Just insert media, watch the little level display and start the recording when you feel good about it.

Wow, it sounds like I actually made a good decision to keep the cd recorder. It does take time to record from vinyl, since you have to do it in real time and hit "pause" between cuts so that it will go to the next track. But, it's worth it to me. I've got vinyl that I've not been able to find on cd.

Thanks for the info you techno dudes!

Yeah, I always wanted one because it was just simple.

Never did bother though. Mostly because of the SGI audio. Just used that.

Now that I've given all of that away, I'll be getting some sampling gear in the coming months. Computer sound cards just kind of suck...

BTW: Some laptop cards are damn good! The one I'm on now is notably better than most add-on computer cards I've used. Haven't really done the work to see where the noise floor is. My ear is telling me it's better than the cards.

The entertainment PC's seem to have some work done in this area.

One gotcha with using computer soundcards is: make sure that audio sources other than the line input, such as the microphone input and any auxiliary inputs supported by the card (i.e. tuner, telephone, CD, etc) are muted or turned all the way down. Leaving these in the mix will certainly add noise.