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Topic: Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted (Read 13237 times) previous topic - next topic
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Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

I am interested in hearing a vinyl to digital transfer that was done from a quality turntable setup (mine were done from a mass market 80s table) or in fact any that people consider to be of good quality irrespective of equipment.

If anyone has any samples they could post it would be really helpful in deciding if my vinyl transfers are of sufficient quality to archive.

Thanks in advance!



Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #3
Do you mean keeping a copy of the raw recording? Suppose the recording is a very good copy of what is on the LP. Is that any more reason to store it long term than if it were not a good copy? Why might you want a long stored copy?

I am not suggesting that you don’t, or should not, want such a thing. I’m just asking if you have fully considered it. Are you recording rare disks that might not have another source?

I started out making back-up copies of my raw recordings, which in those days were at 32/88.2kHz. I soon came to question, and then to abandon, the practice. First, it involved the presumption that I would not be able to re-record, should I ever want to, which is probably not true. Second, upon consideration, I could not think of any realistic reason I would likely want to re-record. It did not fit my purposes for recording in the first place.

I got into this because I never liked the intrinsic vinyl noise nor the damage noise. I continued by buying hundreds of thrift store LPs because I rather enjoyed the process of turning a scratchy mess into an enjoyable CD. The end product is the purpose. One could certainly make the argument that it is a fairly idiotic undertaking, maybe like building ships in bottles. It only matters to me, not to any of the rest of the world.

I write the final audio CD and I back-up that with Monkey’s Audio. FLAC or several other formats would be as good. The raw recording is only the starting point. There is always at least several hours work after that, sometimes days of work. The labor, to me, is the thing most wort preserving. No matter the format, additional back-ups of those 600 albums before they were fixed would have been expensive (relative to my budget) and would take a lot of physical space I don’t really have. I have kept a few albums pre-corrections because there is such a large contrast with the finished product (I put those on the same CD as the finished album, as audio tracks). I can’t provide raw recordings of good condition LPs unless I re-record.

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #4
I'm not sure if the OP is asking specifically about recordings pre-cleanup, although my link didn't need any cleanup IIRC. I do use Audacity's crude click remover nowadays though.

That said, I find keeping the original recordings around is useful for a number of reasons. It's useful in forensic situations where I want to figure out if the noise levels went up/down because I changed cartridges, or even if the noise levels changed due to the passage of time or cleaning regimens I might apply in the future. It's useful in case I come across a superior processing package in the future which reduces noise better. Once or twice I've made some grave mistake in the cleanup process and I'll just go back to the FLACs instead of rerecord.

I typically trim the start and end of the raw side recordings and export it to lossyWAV --extreme | FLAC and then dump them on DVD+R. When it's all said and done the 24/96 recordings are down to 600kbps, and I don't need many DVD+Rs to store all the raw recordings from several days of transcriptions.

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #5
Thanks for the excellent examples.

My objective is to make a (raw) master copy of the transfer that I am happy with quality-wise so I don't have to do the transfer process again.

I did a transfer of all my vinyl to digital with a cartridge (Grado Black) that gave a very dull sound that was especially pronounced on 33rpm LPs and to a lesser degree on 45rpm singles. So I am going to do it again with a different cartridge (the standard one) that is brighter and nicer to listen to.

Here's a thread that compares the two cartridges and a CD of the same song (although the CD is a remastered version)
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=65469

The examples provide a nice yardstick in terms of sound. Mine aren't quite as good, but are reasonably close (as far as I can tell!).

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #6
I am interested in hearing a vinyl to digital transfer that was done from a quality turntable setup (mine were done from a mass market 80s table) or in fact any that people consider to be of good quality irrespective of equipment.

If anyone has any samples they could post it would be really helpful in deciding if my vinyl transfers are of sufficient quality to archive.


Music is fun, but where the rubber hits the road and makes things really clear technically, are transcriptions of test records.  By most accounts, the numero-uno modern test record is the ca. 2000 version of the High Fidelity News Test record.

Any of you big spenders out there ever pony up the $50 or so that it takes to play my game? ;-)

Here's an analysis of what my mid-priced, legacy setup can doL

http://www.pcavtech.com/play-rec/rega-2/index.htm

I'm aware of the discusion here in 2002 about my test, but I was not here to defend myself, and most of the comments were not as well-informed as one could hope.

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #7
Music is fun, but where the rubber hits the road and makes things really clear technically, are transcriptions of test records.  By most accounts, the numero-uno modern test record is the ca. 2000 version of the High Fidelity News Test record.

Any of you big spenders out there ever pony up the $50 or so that it takes to play my game? ;-)

I don't have the HiFi News test record, but I do have the HiFi Sound HFS75 one, and you can find FLAC encodings of transcriptions of that from my Linn LP12/Lingo/Ittok/Karma setup here:
http://delback.co.uk/turntable_tests/

Not sure if any of these cuts are any help for your sort of analysis - the HFS75 record is more to do with optimally setting up a turntable than measuring its actual performance.

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #8
Music is fun, but where the rubber hits the road and makes things really clear technically, are transcriptions of test records.  By most accounts, the numero-uno modern test record is the ca. 2000 version of the High Fidelity News Test record.

Any of you big spenders out there ever pony up the $50 or so that it takes to play my game? ;-)

I don't have the HiFi News test record, but I do have the HiFi Sound HFS75 one, and you can find FLAC encodings of transcriptions of that from my Linn LP12/Lingo/Ittok/Karma setup here:
http://delback.co.uk/turntable_tests/

Not sure if any of these cuts are any help for your sort of analysis - the HFS75 record is more to do with optimally setting up a turntable than measuring its actual performance.


Absolutely exemplary from a procedural standpoint!

Thank you!

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #9
Music is fun, but where the rubber hits the road and makes things really clear technically, are transcriptions of test records.  By most accounts, the numero-uno modern test record is the ca. 2000 version of the High Fidelity News Test record.

Any of you big spenders out there ever pony up the $50 or so that it takes to play my game? ;-)


Yeah, I've bought it and kind of regretted it. HFNRR does not have a high reputation among test records. Here are the issues I've compiled with it:
  • The spoken announcements on the tonearm resonance bands are inaccurate (ie announcing 10hz when it's really 9hz). That post was regarding the old pressing but the new one has the same issue.
  • Many people report significantly offcenter pressings
  • The +18db torture track appears to have been cut with significant distortion
  • The freq sweep is particularly bad. Its sweep speed is terribly regulated - I honestly think somebody was turning the knob on an oscillator to generate the thing. A tremendous amount of noise creeps in at the 15khz mark. At 18khz subharmonics start to form (!). I pretty strongly believe that turntable/cartridge defects can't cause stuff like this.
WmAx advocates the Ultimate Analogue Test LP nowadays and I'm inclined to give that a shot soon.

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #10
Yeah, I've bought it and kind of regretted it. HFNRR does not have a high reputation among test records. Here are the issues I've compiled with it:
  • The spoken announcements on the tonearm resonance bands are inaccurate (ie announcing 10hz when it's really 9hz). That post was regarding the old pressing but the new one has the same issue.


Sloppiness, but not a serious problem. If you're a Hz off, so what?

Quote
[/li][li]Many people report significantly offcenter pressings


The only problem you've listed that I would take seriously, and its correctable, perhaps a bit messily.

Quote
[/li][li]The +18db torture track appears to have been cut with significant distortion



The Ultimate Analogue Test LP solves this problem by only going up to 12 dB ;-)

Quote
[/li][li]The freq sweep is particularly bad. Its sweep speed is terribly regulated - I honestly think somebody was turning the knob on an oscillator to generate the thing.


At PCAVTech, I used a FFT to analyze the sweep. Doint it that way, all it needs to be is there at all.

Quote
A tremendous amount of noise creeps in at the 15khz mark. At 18khz subharmonics start to form (!). I pretty strongly believe that turntable/cartridge defects can't cause stuff like this.


Sounds like a mistracking cartrdige.

Quote
[/li][/list]WmAx advocates the Ultimate Analogue Test LP nowadays and I'm inclined to give that a shot soon.

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #11
Sloppiness, but not a serious problem. If you're a Hz off, so what?
It's off by a significant fraction of an octave. Fortunately or unfortunately, AT carts tend to be ridiculously poor matches for Technics arms - my actual resonance is somewhere in the 6.5hz range IIRC, measured via demodulation - so it doesn't really matter in my situation. But it could easily mean calling a cartridge a good match and calling it a moderately good match if it fell in the 9-10hz range.

Quote
The Ultimate Analogue Test LP solves this problem by only going up to 12 dB ;-)

Well, yeah.  But it does call into question exactly what a test record is doing with a +18db tone if the cutting head itself can't reproduce it accurately.

Ultimately of course this is really just a reason to move away from test tones to calibrate antiskate; unfortunately we don't have anything hugely better in an objective context.

Quote
At PCAVTech, I used a FFT to analyze the sweep. Doint it that way, all it needs to be is there at all.
Maybe if you read out the peak values at each frequency, but I don't expect that to yield terribly good frequency resolution - since the FFT windows would have to be rather small. And summed FFTs will be somewhat compromised by harmonics. If you do larger block FFTs up to a single-block FFT of the entire sample, the speed varies enough that the spot power is significantly corrupted.

The best method (again) would involve demodulating into AM+FM, but I'm not terribly sure that would completely restore my faith in a sweep that appears to have been done manually.


Quote
Sounds like a mistracking cartrdige.
Bah!  I've seen it on both my OC9 and my 440ML. It seems somewhat unlikely that it could be tracking/tracing related when two mciroline stylii reproduce it. What does your sweep look like?

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #12
Using the program that I wrote decribed in this thread, I created the attached composite file from two transfers of different copies of the LP. Both of the original LP transfers had quite a few clicks and I did no other removal of clicks than what the compositing process accomplished. The turntable was a Linn Basik with a Shure V15 cartridge.[attachment=4726:GoHomeGirl.wv]

edit: fixed attachment to be conforming WavPack file 

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #13
Using the program that I wrote decribed in this thread, I created the attached composite file from two transfers of different copies of the LP. Both of the original LP transfers had quite a few clicks and I did no other removal of clicks than what the compositing process accomplished. The turntable was a Linn Basik with a Shure V15 cartridge.


what is the actual format of this file? It appears to be lacking headers.

 

Vinyl-to-digital high quality transfer examples wanted

Reply #14
what is the actual format of this file? It appears to be lacking headers.
It's a standard WavPack file...read more here

Oops! Sorry, I take that back. This file has an invalid header that most players accept (which is why I didn't notice), but some don't (which is how I figured it out). I have uploaded a fixed copy. Thanks! 

If you're not set up to play WavPack files, the easiest way to try is the flash decoder.