[XCSSA] Recovering Vinyl Records w/Open Source Software

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

I often hear people say that computer sound cards cannot be made very 
good because of electromagnetic noise, etc.

However, this flies in the face of quite a few high end audio cards 
which are often used in very demanding applications, such as equipment 
testing and digital audio mastering.  They may use a few tricks (such as 
on-card voltage re-regulation) but they get the job done.

I have an oldie, a Turtle Beach Fiji which is a 20 bit card, which is 
the center of my audio measurement system which can detect very low 
levels of distortion (0.0022%) and noise.  It's just in an ordinary 
beige box computer and works fine.  The most high end audio measurement 
systems you can get, the Audio Precision systems of various kinds, are 
all PC based.  (Of course, they provide the PC, which is custom made. 
 For $22,000 they ought to.)

I also have a M-Audio 2496 (24 bit, 96 Khz) in my Mac.  That's a great 
$99 card.  And there are lots of others by companies like RME and Echo.

The biggest problem with most computer audio is not the "noisy 
electromagnetic environment" but manufacturers who are too cheap to use 
good parts/engineering and rely more on advertising.

But even there, strangely enough, there is typically more of a problem 
with the DA (outputs) then the AD (inputs).  Even ordinary cards often 
have pretty good AD inputs.

That's not to say there's anything wrong with getting a good outboard 
device and then using USB or other digital connection methods.

For my LP copying, I use a standalone device, an Alesis Masterlink 
recorder which has a built-in harddrive.  You can first make a harddrive 
copy in 24 bit, then crop, adjust level and so on, then record to CD in 
16 bit.  This is the same thing that Stereophile turntable guru Michael 
Fremer uses (and also the Stereophile editor John Atkinson).  For a high 
end quality professional product, they're surprisingly cheap at $799.

Only limitation is that it does not have an impulse noise removing 
function to remove pops and clicks.  For my records and listening, I 
don't usually find that necessary.  When I do, I use an SAE 5000A 
impulse noise remover, which is passable.  One thing nice about the SAE 
is that it basically doesn't affect the sound at all when it's not 
removing pops.  When lots of pops are being removed, the sound can get a 
trifle dull sounding.  They can be had on ebay for $50-$100.

Charles





xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:

> I'm sure those who've done this have their own best practices, but as
> I was chasing old links from my personal web site, I found that one of
> the big names in vintage computing had documented his procedure.
>
>     http://home.att.net/~halbower/index.html
>
> If I can ever get my turntable and a computer close enough together,
> I'll have to give it a shot.  It's all in NetBSD pkgsrc...
>
>
> John D. Baker                            NetBSD     Darwin/MacOS X
> http://mylinuxisp(dot)com/(tilde)jdbaker/     OpenBSD            FreeBSD
> BSD.  It just sits there and _works_.
> GPG fingerprint = D703 4A7E 479F 63F8 D3F4  BD99 9572 8F23 E4AD 1645
>
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