Transferring music on vinyl to CD?

[corpus callosum]

Good day fellow Nexians!

I have myself a pretty large collection of music on vinyl and I would love to transfer some of the more choice albums onto CD so I can listen to them in the car.From by brief investigation of this, it seems that there are turntables built for the job (in conjunction with a computer), whilst others suggest getting a few leads (cables) which somehow do the job without using one of those turntables.

So, my question to all you good people is what is the easiest way to do this whilst getting the sound quality as good as possible.If any Nexians have done this, I would be most grateful for any advice or opinions they can offer.

Thanks in advance...

 

[Felnik]

If you have a plain turntable without any kind of fancy
Digital outs on it you need a phono preamp.
The level coming out of a turntable is low and needs to be
Bumped up to be properly recorded .

Unless you have an older amplifier with phono ins and outs
Go out of amplifier into sound card or whatever you use to get audio
Into your computer.

Otherwise a simpler route is

Turntable. Phono preamp. To computer .

Here are some preamp s

Phonopreamps.com Home Page

You've come to the right place if you're looking for phono preamps, styli and cartridges. We also sell speaker and source selectors, and NAB hub adapters for 10.5

www.phonopreamps.com

 

[richierich_931]

You would just need to make sure your computer than can handle a 'line in' connection, have a red and white to 3.5mm jack (standard headphone), and a program to record and store the data. Play the record, record the song. A little time consuming but at least you get to listen to some good music!

The quality of sound from a CD is much much better than a record simply because it can hold much more data, but some CD-R's don't last very long, some as short as 5 years due to organic writing medias so, IMO make sure to backup all data!

 

[Infinite I]

I used my dvs to record my vinyl, saved as 24 bit wav files. They take up a lot of space unlike mp3's but they dont copy to cd so probably no help, but for quality ive found its best. You could use audacity to record audio, its free and straight forward though I have a usb soundcard with my dvs that does it already

 

[Macre]

Also, there's a whole plethora of software and plug-ins available for cleaning up audio. However, since you're transferring from vinyl, you probably won't need them. Unless you wanted to remove the crackles, but I'd want to leave them in.

Peace

Macre

 

[Felnik]

Record in highest possible resolution keep the high res files
Make copies to mp3 later .

24 bit best quality but uses more hard drive space

With transferring records you only want to do it right once .
Forever .

 

[d*l*b]

I wish I had the time to rip my vinyl!

The quality of sound from a CD is much much better than a record simply because it can hold much more data

Although this is obviously a thread about ripping to digital I don’t think this statement is correct, see:

Is the sound on vinyl records better than on CDs or DVDs?

CDs are certainly more widespread these days, but you've probably heard at least one audiophile insist that records have a better sound quality when it comes to their favorite music. How can this be?

electronics.howstuffworks.com

Dynamic Comparison of LPs vs CDs - Part 4

Yes, you have heard all the arguments before, and you are probably sick and tired of it. LP vs digital is a "religious war" that has been played out by various audiophiles ever since the CD format

www.audioholics.com

 

[a1pha]

I recommended you also look into FLAC compression over WAV. You'll cut your overall file-sizes in half while retaining nearly all the audio. There's also support for tagging plus many portable audio devices support FLAC (not iPod). More.

 

[Tsehakla]

If you have a plain turntable without any kind of fancy
Digital outs on it you need a phono preamp.
The level coming out of a turntable is low and needs to be
Bumped up to be properly recorded .

Unless you have an older amplifier with phono ins and outs
Go out of amplifier into sound card or whatever you use to get audio
Into your computer.

Like Felnik says, you need a phono pre-amp or an amp with phono inputs. Not just to bump the signal up to the standard line level but most importantly to look after the necessary RIAA equalization, see: RIAA equalization - Wikipedia

 

[Skeemer]

You definantly need a reciever/amp to power your turntable and recorder, or if you dont mind spending money there are actual turntables with a cd slot in them to transfer vinyl to cd and other turntables that have usb port so you can record right into your computer, then convert to mp3(if not already) then burn. I think those turntable are 200 dollars or so. Or search peer sharing networks for the tracks you want, they my be digital already somewhere.....save you some money

 

[fender1212]

Record in highest possible resolution keep the high res files
Make copies to mp3 later .

24 bit best quality but uses more hard drive space

With transferring records you only want to do it right once .
Forever .

bit rate dictates the maximum possible dynamic range of music. The reality is that the native 16 bit that cds support contains more dynamic range than you can possibly squeeze onto vinyl, so recording to 24 bit is sort of pointless if you're going from vinyl to cd. What DOES make a difference however, is the sample rate. 44.1 is standard for cds, and this represents how many points of data exist within a given amount of time. Some nice sound cards will support up to 192k, and this is about as close to analog as you will get with digital. That is to say, that the higher you sample rate, the smoother your waveforms and the more analog like your sound will be.

However, recording out at anything beyond 44.1 is beyond the scope of most human hearing, and you probably won't notice a difference unless you are stretching the audio for some alternate purpose, at which point a higher sample rate would be preferred. (essentially if you stretch out digital audio at some point you will begin to hear the "bits", but analog will never do this. higher sample rates mean you can stretch it out further before hearing the "bits")