Transferring vinyl to PC (or MAC) Home Theater & iPod

[liewbob]

I am a music lover - but not a "tweak" - with about 4000 LPs (which range in quality from 50s mono that went through stacking on an old KLH changer, up to near-mint MoFi that were mostly played on B&O turntables. My goal is to transfer selected LPs & tracks (as well as cassettes of "Live" concerts) to my computer for use in my home theater system and on my ipod (80G).

For now, I have an ION IttUSB turntable with a Stanton 500 V3 (chosen for its forgivingness of clicks & pops) and I'm wondering whether I should utilize the USB output & Audacity - or if I should go through the RCAs to my Denon AVR-2807 phono input? (Is the RIAA eq built into the ION or is it in Audacity - in which case, I made need additional conversion software).

My speakers are Orb Audio's "People's Choice" 5.1 system - which I like a lot (not quite as warm as my old KEFs (104ab) but right up there with my previous Paradigm Studio 20 based system). My CD-DVD-VHS unit is a Sony RDR-VX555 and I'm using a new Mitsubishi 57734 DLP (57"-1080P) for both video & as a monitor.

I'll be getting a new dual or quad core computer soon and would also appreciate any input on whether to go MAC - as regards audio & multi-media. Will the audio oriented sound cards that are out there also handle Dolby surround?

I'll be researching all this stuff on the web - but I was impressed with this forum and it's often difficult to tell whether the reviews & ratings are objective or influenced by advertisers et al. Please keep in mind that I'm more of a Tandberg-KEF-B&O-Nakamichi guy as opposed to Linn-Levinson on one end or rack systems on the other - and I'd like to keep my evolving system as open as possible for emrging technologies.

Which reminds me: What's the deal with FireWire?

Thanx, in advance, for your assistance

 

[MDS]

I don't know if that particular turntable has a built-in phono pre-amp or not but Audacity definitely doesn't. Audio editors are not concerned with that type of thing - they get the data from the sound card and that is it.

You'll have to use the receiver as a middle man if the turntable doesn't have a built-in pre-amp. You need a decent sound card that does a good of job of analog to digital conversion but you can clean up the recording after the fact. I'd recommend that you record the entire side of the LP or Cassette and then chop it up into tracks and edit each track individually.

What's the question about Firewire?

 

[fmw]

I do what you're working on myself. I use a two channel system to which I have attached a dedicated CD recorder. I dupe the records onto a CD-RW and then rip that to the hard drive, erase it and go again. Obviously, if you have the right equipment for your computer, you can skip the intermediate step and go straight to hard drive. I use the CD recorder because I have it and it does a nice job.

I will suggest one thing. Don't overdo the compression. I make 320 MP3's myself and they sound amazingly good - indistinguishable from the original vinyl record. I use a music server to play them from one of the hard drives on my network through my AV system. If you want to squeeze some files onto an Ipod, you may want to create a second file for each album with a more highly compressed MP3 file. The 320's will be about 100 mb per vinyl record. They will put a dent in your available hard drive space. Listen to those when you can. Carry the more highly compressed ones around with you on an ipod.

Firewire is a high speed communication interface for computers. You won't need it to make dupes of vinyl records. It is a very slow process.

 

[JKL1960]

I haven't posted here for some time.

Many new turntables have built in pre-amps because many newer receivers don't have phono inputs. You don't need to worry though, just use the USB connection to your PC and use the software that came with it. Experimenting with other setups such as through a pre-amp to the PC's line in might be worthwhile. I wouldn't recommend plugging an already pre-amped turntable into a phono input. They are line level already. Check the turntable's manual.

I've never used that set up so I have to make some assumptions. I assume that it will capture wave files. Hopefully it captures in an uncompressed format. I would rip the vinyl to wave files and then use audacity to separate the tracks. I would burn these to music CDs so that they play back in a regular CD player. This would create a good archive of the records. Of course you can keep the files on your HD if you have lots of room.

Then I might use audacity to clean up files that I thought might need it. I might then also encode MP3s from the wave files. Audacity can work with the LAME encoder directly but you might have to download it separately. I've used LAME with great success.

The big thing for me in this type of project would be to archive the data in an uncompressed format. After that you can do anything you want to it.

Hope that helps. Have fun.

 

[ChrisJam]

I'm a long-time Mac user (dual-G5 Power mac right now). For years I've used Amadeus for my sound editing. My current app is Amadeus Pro v1.03 (http://www.hairersoft.com/Amadeus.html ). It does a great job importing the audio and letting you edit it.

I have one turntable. I can either run audio from the turntable through my AVR and out to my Mac, or I can hook the turntable up to the Mac through a pre-amp of some kind--either a dedicated one or one built into another component. Some stand-alone cassette players have pre-amp capability. My 2-year-old Mac has a mini-plug input, a optical input, and maybe RCA inputs.

I'm not going to turn my computer off to pull it out and look behind it to confirm the RCA inputs. If they're not there, a simple adaptor plug will suffice, going into the mini input.

I don't want 5.1 sound in my office, so I've never investigated a 5.1 card for a Mac, but yes, there are Mac-compatible audio sound cards that handle surround sound.

Firewire? As far as I know, it's not needed for this application. It has other great purposes, though.

Chris