A non-political discussion over at Free Republic.
One of these days I’ll get a new tonearm and cartridge for my Rega Planar turntable and break out a collection that I haven’t listened to in over a decade. Of course, sometimes things that you put off till “one of these days” sometimes never happen.
I bought a USB turntable a few years ago so as to finally rip to MP3 the albums I have been dragging around for 20-40 years. I’ve done a few so far — particularly a Ken Nordine double album — but the truth is, those decades-old vinyl platters just don’t sound all that great. 🙂 There is some nostalgic value in the hiss and pop, thought. ..bruce..
I didn’t mention that having bought the turntable back in 2008 or so, it sat in its unopened box until a few weeks ago. ..bruce..
Bruce, they don’t sound great because USB turntables aren’t that great. They have their own digital compression, and they tend to overdo it. To really hear your records, you need to get a real turntable and plug it into an analog amplifier. I don’t know if modern receivers even have phono preamps these days.
That reminds me of a project I’ve had on the mental back-burner for years: A non-contact vinyl player that’d scan the whole groove profile on the fly, then process the data stream to extract info on the original as-cut groove trajectory, minus dings, dust grains, and needle wear. I estimated the needed data and processing bandwidth a long while back, and promptly gave it up as affordable hardware then didn’t come close. That might be worth revisiting in light of current hardware…
And you need a good record cleaner to remove some of the ‘pops’.
Plus Rand is dead-on about the USB turntables. They aslo tend to have bottom-feeder cartridges.
That reminds me of a project I’ve had on the mental back-burner for years: A non-contact vinyl player that’d scan the whole groove profile on the fly, then process the data stream to extract info on the original as-cut groove trajectory, minus dings, dust grains, and needle wear.
There is a laser turntable on the market but the price is terrifying.
I’ve transferred my vinyl collection into my iPod via USB turntable, as Bruce did. Don’t know how much USB turntable quality varies, and the one I used wasn’t quite as good as the old Technics system I have, but it did do a pretty good job overall. Hard to tell the difference between a file from vinyl and one from iTunes (not that the compressed file as played on an iPod is an audiophile’s dream). But I can listen to the old tunes when I’m skiing or on a long drive, instead of rarely or never like I did when they were still on vinyl.
You can wash old vinyl albums with lukewarm water and dishwashing soap. This will get out a lot of the dust that makes it pop & crackle. Do it gently and dry with a soft cloth. You can also record it with the vinyl surface itself damp or wet to get the dust out of the grooves. There are some Shure carts that run around $100 that do a pretty good job. Nice project. Make sure you get the soap out of the grooves or it will tend to muck them up.
Rand, there are few receivers that have phono preamps built-in nowadays (unless you’re willing to pay “audiophile” prices), but you can buy a decent standalone phono preamp (with line-level RCA jack outputs) for about $100. Probably doesn’t compare to my old Apt/Holman preamp, but that one was just about the best phono preamp around in the early ’80s.
Cthulhu.
I got a uesd McIntosh 4100 I am getting re-furbed and re-capped for $300 by a factory cert tech. It has a pre-amp.
There are some nice tube based phono pre-amps that are not insane coin.
If you want a new Integrated amp that is highly regarded that contains a phono pre-amp and is a steal for the price:
http://www.outlawaudio.com/products/rr2150.html
I also recommend any people wanting to get into vinyl and audiophilia check out http://www.stevehoffman.tv
“There is a laser turntable on the market but the price is terrifying.”
Yeah, $12K for the bottom-of-the-line on closeout? Steep.
If you look at the tech description on that site, they don’t scan the entire groove and process out damage/dust either – they just aim for an arbitrary slice of the groove wall that they hope isn’t worn or damaged. They mention that any trace of dust will sound really bad.
The trick, I think, would be to find off-the-shelf hardware that can be adapted cheaply for the groove tracking and scanning, then come up with a clever way to process the groove wall scan data on the fly that will reliably pick out the original groove profile… And I just figured out a way to do that, after all these years on the back burner. Heh.
Only problem is, as anything other than a hobby project, you’d have to charge audiophile prices simply because the market is so small at this point…
Does this involve RADAR Henry?
“Does this involve RADAR Henry?”
Say what? Radar wavelengths are too long relative to the feature sizes that needs scanning in an LP record groove. Laser is the way to go for the scan. (Or am I missing an obscure cultural reference?..)
The tricky part is doing the data processing to extract the original as-cut groove profile, to audiophile standards, from the scan data in realtime…
Good point, you could never get the wavelength small enough. Even millimeter would be too huge.
Someday, they will be able to image a holographic copy and manipulate internally but that will take grotesquely enormous, cheap computing power.