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ivan@stellysee.de
| From | "Farrar Hudkins" <fhudkins@gmail.com> |
| Subject | vinyl |
| Date | Thu, 25 May 2006 13:25:27 -0500 |
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Seeing a bit of discusion of it on the list, I thought I would:
a.) praise and thank those who are getting interested in moving their
vinyl to the Digital Domain, and
b.) give an example of how to do it.
I have had excellent results (some of which I have actually received
money for). Please feel free to go your own way with this, as again it
is only an example -- one setup of many.
I have an old Technics SL-1200MKII with two modifications available
from kabusa.com: their tonearm fluid damper kit and the probably
available elsewhere heavy platter mat, which is a Technics item. I've
tapped the desk many a time and still heard nothing in my cans so I am
satisfied with this system. (Also, there's no rumble so no need for a
rumble filter, except on cheap vinyl.) I use the standard headshell
which came with the turntable, and a Shure V15VxMR which tracks at one
gram and yields the flattest response of any cartridge I've seen
selling for under $1,000. (Although the cartridge itself is
discontinued, the replacement styli are still manufactured, and IMHO
any of the V15 series are good audiophile cartridges.)
Between the turntable and the computer sits a Rane MP24z mixing
console, which I got because it has three kick-ass preamps in it and I
can also hook up the tape deck, etc. and pump it into my computer.
(Also it has a built in four-band parametric equalizer, though I use
that function only on cassettes.) The Rane has balanced outs which I
run into my computer (Creative Audigy Platinum sound card, good signal
to noise ratio which I can't remember but is nigh to 100 decibels).
On the computer I have two pieces of software which I think are fantastic:
1.) WaveLab by Steinberg, which is what I use to I record the vinyl at
the highest sample rate possible (in my case 96k/24bit). The reason I
do this is because should I have to process it, I don't want any
artefacts appearing toward that sharp cutoff at 22,050Hz. The only
processing I do, however, is using a VST plugin which comes with the
program -- it's called "Spectralizer" and adds the second and third
harmonic above a specified frequency; this has the advantage of
bringing more "high end" to records whose upper frequencies have been
scraped off, without getting the hiss involved in bumping up the
higher frequencies on an equalizer. The only other "processing" I do
in this program is manually removing any garish pops by silencing them
and then using interpolation, when possible, to restore the lost audio
(although most people don't notice a tempo change when a millisecond
is removed). I hear that Cubase, CoolEdit, et al are also very good
recording/editing software, and I would suggest that anything capable
of handling a VST plugin (it stands for Virtual Studio Technology, by
the way) would be fine as the Spectralizer does a wonderful job in
bringing back the "shine" of recorded cymbals, violins, piano, etc.
2.) Clean! also by Steinberg. (Yes, the exclamation point is part of
the name of the software. Silly, I though, but I'm not in marketing.)
This has filters which used to come in rack-mountable gear: de-noise,
de-click, de-crackle, rumble filter, etc., with the advantage of an
"audition" feature so that one can listen to what is being removed and
make sure no music is being taken away as well. The only filter I use,
however, is de-crackle, at least on vinyl. It has many features I
don't use, including an EQ and the ability to create a sort of faux
surround-sound. (I hear the newer versions of this program have a
"fingerprint" feature where you can sample the surface noise of a disc
and then create a custom filter to cancel those frequencies, but I
don't have that in version 3.) The drawback to Clean! is that it only
accepts 44.1k/16bit files so I have to downconvert everything before
de-crackling it.
I hope that information is useful to the vinyl-to-CD crowd. :)
Also, if anyone would care to hear some samples, I would be happy to
provide them, if you can find me a place to "post" them on the web
where folks can download them.
Kind regards,
Farrar Hudkins
New Orleans, LA
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