Need to pick the teams brain again....

A&D Ointment

I like LPs too, and older CDs, and newer remasters if they really try to be faithful to the dynamic range, and not hard limit or even clip the sound. Now we have the scourge of audible digital watermarking on files from the music services on line, and the LP is free from all of that. Recordings from the vinyl era were also mastered with LP in mind.

I digitize LPs for airplay too, hopefully with the option of playing the digital or vinyl when on the air live. There are merits to both I think. There's the aesthetic of using a real record in a live situation, where you might hear the needle dropping down, or maybe it will even skip during play! A digital lossless copy of the same thing has advantages too, sounds like the vinyl on the air with minimal cleanup.

My workflow is to clean the record, record it into Cool Edit or Audition, fades in and out, and apply rumble filter over the whole track. For scratched records with loud pops, I'll remove or reduce those individually. That might not be perfectly archival, but works for my listening and airplay situations.

At least it's better than when I ended up with these tools around 2000, and tried all the tricks to make records sound like CDs because I had the power. Now my goal is to capture natural playback and remove defects only, like the pop that's 10 db above the recorded level of the track.

I like musicians' USB interfaces, if you can get stereo line levels into them from the preamp. Recently I've used a Behringer mini mixer with Xenyx preamps, a Guitar Center special. M-Audio should have something good, I sure do like their playback over any computer sound card I've heard to feed my transmitters.

I haven't been doing much vinyl conversion recently, but I think there's a lot of good audio gear out there now, with musicians and home studios for online broadcasting, I think we're at a peak right now with A/D.

Boomer