Transferring Vinyl to CDR

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by pauljones, Dec 20, 2002.

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  1. pauljones

    pauljones Forum Chef Thread Starter

    Location:
    columbia, sc
    I've just recently gotten into transferring my favorite LP's onto CDR. I have noticed that many older albums note "use the RIAA curve" or NAB equalized, or such.
    What does this mean?
    Some vintage equipment had selectors for LP equalization.

    What is this all about, and what do I need to do to properly transfer these recordings?

    Thanks,
    Paul
     
  2. Gary Freed

    Gary Freed Forum Resident

    Hi Paul!

    Ronfluglehorn is experienced at this and might be a good source of information if you ask him. He probably has many of the answers that you are looking for.

    Hope all is well!
     
  3. ZIPGUN99

    ZIPGUN99 Active Member

    if your amp has a built in phono stage, i'm sure you will get fine results.

    it will compensate for the RIAA curve.

    Do your CD-r's sound allright? if so, keep going and have fun!
     
  4. pauljones

    pauljones Forum Chef Thread Starter

    Location:
    columbia, sc
    Hi, Gary and Bob!

    Bob-hope you are getting over the flu.

    My vinyl transfers really sound good. What I have tried since the family seems to be on the computer so much is transferring my LP's totally flat, with no EQ fiddling or NR used, to my standalone CD recorder.

    What I do is audition the LP very carefully first and get a sense for lead-in groove noise and track spacing. What I have found is that what is distracting is clicks and pops between tracks. If you have mint condition vinyl, which almost all of mine are, noise is not usually apparent during the tracks.

    By auditioning, you can almost count the "swooshes" and ticks so that you can get a clean beginning to each track. Then, very careful fading out of the tracks can also be done so that surface noise is not obtrusive.

    Also, watch the levels. Believe it or not, sometimes album sides are mastered at different volume levels!

    Be sure to clean the disc thoroughly, calibrate the speed on your turntable, adjust the anti-skating if your table has it, and also carefully clean the stylus.

    The results can be fantastic.

    Paul
     
  5. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I do the computer thing, as most here know, so I clean them up!

    What I like about software is that you can place the track starts anywhere you desire with pinpoint acurracy, and even adjust the gaps between songs and rearrange the tracks.
     
  6. pauljones

    pauljones Forum Chef Thread Starter

    Location:
    columbia, sc
    Grant,
    What software do you use?

    Thanks,
    Paul
     
  7. sgraham

    sgraham New Member

    Location:
    Michigan
    The RIAA curve has been the standard for most of the lifetime of the LP, but in earlier eras slightly different curves were used. In recording "pre-emphasis" is used, boosting the treble and reducing the bass by a specified amount, and in playback the inverse equalization is applied to restore normal frequency balance. The RIAA curve spells out the exact characteristics of this pre/post emphasis. LPs made with other curves may sound a little mid-bassy or a little thin, but will generally be in the ball park using the (now standard) RIAA curve.
     
  8. Ronflugelguy

    Ronflugelguy Resident Trumpet Geek

    Location:
    Modesto,Ca
    My new rule don't get into a situation where you are at the top of the recording levels, it seems to really squash the dynamics. I always try to record at a lower level on Lps, being sure I'm not pushing it too much. I rarely ever change my level for different Lps. One setting seems to work, unless you change cartridges. When I record CDs, I do it at 0 db most of the time. If you are transferring HDCDs, it has to be . That's what I do.
     
  9. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Cool Edit Pro 2.0 w/Click-Fix, Audio Tech and Sound Forge 6.0 Direct-X plug-ins

    Sound Forge 6.0 w/plug-ins
     
  10. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    One should be aware that if one records at 16-bit and doesn't take advantage of the full dynamic range possible, one is in fact making a 14-bit recording.
     
  11. Ronflugelguy

    Ronflugelguy Resident Trumpet Geek

    Location:
    Modesto,Ca
    I just make sure that I am not overloading the digital medium, as I is much less forgiving than analog recording.
     
  12. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    One should always be careful with levels in digital recording of any stripe. What one can do in a computer-based editor is if you clip you can restore the sound with the declip tool. Works great.
     
  13. -=Rudy=-

    -=Rudy=- ♪♫♪♫♫♪♪♫♪♪ Staff

    Location:
    US
    For a few years now, I've been using SoundForge 4.5 with a half dozen different plug-ins (pop/click, FX1, FX2, FX3, etc.). I stay with the old version because it's the last one to support CD Architect. LOVE that program!! I've done some really nice work putting together CDs this way, and so far, I have yet to find a CD burning program that can even come close to the capabilities. CD Architect doesn't support the newest drives, but someone wrote a small utility called CDPBurn that will take CD Architect's files and burn them to a modern CD-RW drive.

    Almost hate to admit it, but on some older recordings I do use a touch of compression via a "mastering compressor" that, with a light enough touch, allows you to get a little extra 'oomph' out of the sound without squashing the you-know-what out of it. One plugin I don't use for CDs, but play with, is a "tube" simulator. It does warm up the sound, and if you overadjust it, you get a very tube-like distortion. Clever! (As if 2nd-order harmonic distortion is clever... ;) )

    I bought a digital-input card for the computer just when I started getting into this. (It accepts both consumer and pro digital signals via optical and coaxial.) Unfortunately it won't work in newer computers, so I keep it in an older Pentium Pro that I lug over to the audio rack when I want to make a transfer. I specifically bought a Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum due to all of the digital inputs it had, but after I tried it once, I could tell there was some kind of digital processing going on, as no matter how hard I pushed the digital audio into it, it would never quite hit 0dB. Nice card for playback (especially of DVDs), but a terrible waste of money for getting sonic accuracy. :realmad:
     
  14. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Rudy, You really should step up to the new CD Architect 5.0.

    Also, the newer versions of Sound Forge support 32-bit processing and higher sampling rates, plus tons of other things that bring it up to the level of all the other editors!
     
  15. -=Rudy=-

    -=Rudy=- ♪♫♪♫♫♪♪♫♪♪ Staff

    Location:
    US
    Egads!! You mean....you mean.....they actually decided to update it for 2002?? And it works with the newest SoundForge?

    Are you for real? You mean there's really a Santa?????? :D
     
  16. Paul C.

    Paul C. Senior Member

    Location:
    Australia
    I was wondering - what facilities does CD Architect offer that you don't get from other mastering tools. I've been using Nero for buring my LP transfers, and I'm not sure what CD Architect could add to that.

    I recently commented on the little program "LP Recorder" which I had used to capture LP audio to 16-bit wav files. I used its "auto-level" function, which lowers the input level based on the peaks encountered during LP playback - thus, I would play through a track once before recording, and use it to set the level. Unfortunately, I discovered on the weekend that the levels were still set too high (I've been using version 2.2, but it's up to v5.0 now, and their method for setting the level may have changed). When I auditioned a CD that I'd created, there was major distortion on a couple of bits. So I did some more testing, and burnt track excerpts from loud sections at different levels - when I did this, I found that I had to set the level considerably lower to avoid distortion. I also noticed that when I did this, my waveform (as displayed in CoolEdit) appeared to have a wider dynamic range - prior to this, some tracks that I had transferred looked like there was very little variation in the amplitude of the waveform - even though I could not discern audible distortion - does this mean that clipping was occcurring? Would I be able to easily hear it if it was clipped?

    I don't know if visual inspection of the waveform in CoolEdit is a valid way of determining if the signal has been clipped. It would be nice if there was an objective way that a software program could set the optimum maximum level; for recording to avoid any clipping and distortion - but I don't know if that is possible.
     
  17. -=Rudy=-

    -=Rudy=- ♪♫♪♫♫♪♪♫♪♪ Staff

    Location:
    US
    I have been using Nero, Roxio CD Creator and CD Architect. I'm getting away from Nero just due to a few issues I have with it...I'm finding that the Roxio seems a little more stable on my system.

    That said, I only use Roxio (or Nero) if I'm making a compilation CD from WAV files (or a few stray MP3 files) on my computer. When I bought all four of Stevie Ray Vaughan's studio recordings, for example, I was able to condense four CDs down to two, for the CD changer. I'd copy the tracks from the CD to WAV files, then dump the WAV files back into Roxio and burn away.

    CD Architect is on a different planet. It's really hard to explain without actually showing someone how it works, but the first thing to keep in mind is that this is for creating red book standard CDs, and gives you fine control over every aspect of creating an audio CD. This is nothing you can just dump WAV files into and expect the software to clean them up and prepare them for a CD recording. On the contrary--whatever you have in your WAV file is what's going onto the CD. (The prep work is done in SoundForge--the pop/click filtering, noise reduction, EQ, fade-ins and fadeouts or editing out the between-track noise, even compression if desired.)

    I may need to make a screen shot to explain what I've done with CD Architect. I've learned a few tricks where I've been able to adjust the volume of individual tracks, and even overlap the tracks to get a "segue" effect for some compilations I've put together. Heck, if you remember the CD's rarely-used feature, the "index", you can even put index points onto your CD tracks.

    There is a learning curve to overcome, but I've felt it's worth it.
     
  18. sgraham

    sgraham New Member

    Location:
    Michigan
    With all due respect to Grant's obviously high level of expertise here, I have to say I'd rather lose a bit or two's worth of resolution by recording slightly low than go over the top and do a clip restore, which seems to me like a tool of last resort.
     
  19. Paul C.

    Paul C. Senior Member

    Location:
    Australia
    Thanks Rudy - I will look further into that one.

    Steve and/or Grant - what is a "declip"?
     
  20. sgraham

    sgraham New Member

    Location:
    Michigan
    If you record "too loud" you "clip" the audio - since the signal can't get any louder, it flatlines at the maximum possible level - you've "clipped off" the top part of the waveform. A declipper can let you reduce the overall gain and restore what should be there where it flatlined. However there's a limit to how far you can take this, obviously.

    And here's a neat related trick: The declipper in Cool Edit Pro is designed for situations where you have gone over the maximum digital level. If instead you overdrove, for instance, a mike preamp, you may have a recording which is badly distorted, yet does not have a "flat top" or reach maximum level. It was not designed to deal with this, but you may be able to fake it out: Sometimes if you have Cool Edit boost the gain to the point where you do end up with a flatlined top, you can then use the de-clipper to remove or reduce the distortion. I saved a choir recording (someone else's!) that way.


    By the way, CD Architect is a beautiful thing! It'll even let you put audio in the gaps between tracks, great for live recordings.
     
  21. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    It's a standalone only program now.
     
  22. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Actually, as long as a program burns Disc-At-Once it will burn a red-book-CD.

    CD Architect is considered the most professional tool for the Windows platform. Problem is, it requires a LOT of processor power and memory.

    I too many issues with Nero and EAC on my PC, so I stick with CD Creator Deluxe and Cool Edit Pro CD burning.
     
  23. -=Rudy=-

    -=Rudy=- ♪♫♪♫♫♪♪♫♪♪ Staff

    Location:
    US
    The version of CD Architect I'm using ran fine on an old Pentium Pro with only 160MB of memory. Maybe the new one is more of a resource hog...? The only time I'd get slowed down by CD Architect was when dragging WAV files into it.

    It was SoundForge that really sucked up the resources--I used to set things up as a batch, let all the plug-ins run, and let them run overnight. On my Athlon computers, I can run a batch and maybe grab a quick snack as they run. :) It's still disk access that creates the biggest bottleneck. My next system will likely have a SCSI hard drive configuration, and just use IDE for less-critical archive storage.

    I'll have to find out if the newest SoundForge would accept my current DirectX plug-ins. I really don't want to have to replace all of them if I don't have to.
     
  24. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Rudy,

    SoundForge 6.x is MUCH faster than all the older versions! And, it uses much less processing power! As long as you have the latest Direct-X version and/or Direct-X Runtime installed, you can run all of the DX plug-ins you want, especiall seeing that most of SF tools are now DX plug-ins themselves!

    But, CD Architect IS a resource hog now.
     
  25. -=Rudy=-

    -=Rudy=- ♪♫♪♫♫♪♪♫♪♪ Staff

    Location:
    US
    Grant: my only bottleneck right now are disk speeds. When I built this computer, I went with more memory and a better graphics card since I use a lot of Adobe and Macromedia software. I'm glad CD Architect has been rescued though--resource hog or not, I would be disappointed not having it.

    I have plenty of filter plugins now, but one I'd really like to get is a filter that would eradicate groove wear distortion. I'm sure there's some kind of sonic fingerprint someone could single out and create a filter for.
     
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