Transferring Vinyl to CDR

That's a pretty tall order, I think. The trouble is that it's unpredictable. If you have a worn stylus slamming around, mistracking, chiseling bits out of the vinyl, it's not going to do it in a very repeatable fashion, I wouldn't think. Some clever person might come up with a way to disguise it, but I'd expect it to be a mixed blessing just like noise reduction, noise also being unpredictable by nature.

 

The only one I have used that has come close is Waves Restoration-X plug-in. But, of course, your transients will be degraded somewhat.

 

I have had some success reducing groove wear/mistracking distortion using the Younglove technique with Cool Edit. But it must be applied selectively (which is very tedious) or you will lose percussive attack transients, the top end off pulse waves, etc.

Also, groove wear/mistracking by its nature means lost detail. No way to get that back.

 

The right way to do it seems to be to record at 24 bits, aiming to use as much of the headroom as possible but without risking digital clipping. Missing a couple of dB would increase a bit the s/n but you'll have an adequate digital window to capture the music.

Then you can normalize, dither and resample to 16 bits.

 

I have been fortunate not to have transferred too many LPs with groove wear, but I have found it somewhat easy to fix it by hand if it is only one or two spots. In Cool Edit, if you zoom in a bit, you can usually see little nicks or burs along the smooth wave form that you can "declick" individually along the wave. It probably won't work on all of them and it would be time consuming to do it a on a seriously effected record, but it can be done in some cases.

 

Just use the Spectral view under the View menu. It's much easier to see those clicks!

 

I'd rather have degraded peaks than a burst of "static" each time a strong midrange signal comes through. (Think of a vocal passage.) Even lessening it helps matters, for me. In looking at a groove-worn wave up close, it has a very recognizable signature...sort of like de-clicking but on a microscopic scale. On one nasty song I worked on, I had a de-clicking filter with some rather mutilated settings, and applied it to only the problematic sections. Also cut the very high frequencies ever so slightly. Both techniques helped a little, but you can still hear the wear.

 

Sounds like a painstaking process to really convert some old LP's and get
the desired results.

 

It really depends on what shape your records are in. If you've got a nice minty LP, there's little more to do than play it back and maybe take out a couple of clicks afterward. If you've got something with more noise, you have to walk a fine line between getting rid of the clicks and making sure you don't start taking music with them.

Of course, clean records really help. While I have yet to get one myself, I guess the vacuum type cleaners are they way to go. Also, having a cartridge that tracks everything helps a lot. A liner-contact or micro-line stylus will generally track things a lot better than a conical or even an elliptical stylus. It can make a big difference in the inner grooves.

One thing I just discovered that's really nice is Spark (on the Mac) lets you use plug-ins as you record. Thus, you can de-click as you're recording, all in one step, rather than spending time later doing it. Sometimes you'll want the flexibility of doing it after the fact, but if you know what you're doing and you know what's coming, de-clicking while recording is very handy.

 

Thanks Luke,


I guess at the end of the chain, the weakest link will be the bottleneck to achieving a great CD.

The LP should be a good quality recording to begin with , the Turntable and Stylus are important and also the A/D conversion in the Sound Card and quality Software.

It's amazing what one can do these days with a computer and some
decent equipment.

 

With SoundForge's noise reduction plug-in, I've found that I get better results declicking when I do it in two or three passes. I'll do a light pass first, which picks up only ticks (and not very many). I'll then go back and pick up lighter ticks if I need to. Sometimes I have to select only a small snippet and apply the tick removal (fleas are next ) for the really difficult ones (sometimes buried in the percussion). For an individual click, I'll often just draw it out with the drawing tool. SoundForge has an 'invert' setting so you can hear what you're removing, which helps me set the filter properly. If I'm doing this from clean vinyl, I can usually just locate a couple of minor ticks by ear and draw them out by hand.

A vacuum is the way to go. Even the $199 Record Doctor from the Audio Advisor beats a Discwasher brush. (The Discwasher is still good before playing an LP.) Results are variable for me. Some LPs don't sound much cleaner, but others that I've considered a lost cause have come out very quiet, almost like new. Only improvement I made was to buy a VPI record cleaner brush, which works better than the felt applicators that come with the Nitty Gritty machines.

I only shudder when I hear of a couple of fellow collectors who use tap water and dishwashing detergent to wash off their vinyl, and then dry it on a terrycloth towel. And they can't even hear all of the crud they just washed down to the bottom of the grooves!!

Since it first came out, I've owned a Shure V15-V. A year or two after it was out, they introduced the MicroRidge stylus for it, which made it track even better. I won't own anything else! I have quite a few LPs and 12" singles that are cut very hot, and none of the other cartridges I've owned have ever come close to tracking like this one (even a couple of Grados and a Dynavector). It does make all the difference! I finally found I could listen to 45s--without all the distortion!

 

Here's a tip I've found useful. If there's a click that the de-clicker can't find to remove, and you're having a hard time locating it, try highlighting the general area and then doing a (temporary) "vocal removal" (i.e. subtract the channels (invert phase on one channel and sum them)). *Usually* the click will be plainly visible then - espeically if it's a mono record that you have recorded in "stereo" (one advantage to summing the two channels *after* the fact). You can mark where it is, undo the "vocal removal" and now that you have located it, select "remove single click" in Cool Edit, or otherwise deal with it manually.

 

sgraham,

Interesting! I will try this on my next restoration project!

 

Doing a mono transfer in stereo is also good if one track is a little cleaner than the other since you can change the mix to compensate. SoundForge actually has a mixer where two pairs of sliders can determine how much of each channel appears in the output signal, either plus or minus. So you can add or subtract signal to make the stereo image wider or narrower (or completely mono), or create a mono mix of 80% left channel and 20% right channel. Very difficult to explain, but it comes in handy. I only sum to mono *after* I do all of my other cleanup.

I also found a way with one of the SoundForge plugins (the DirectX "Reverb", which is part of one of the three "FX" plugin packs I have) to create a decent fake stereo. (I amuse easily.) This reverb plugin works on the principal of early and late reverb--early being similar to the sounds bouncing around a stage before the later sounds created by the theater itself. Dry out, reverb out and early out are the three sliders to adjust. Reverb out I cut just about all the way down. Early out, though, I kick up a little more than normal. It can give a slight spread to the mono sound. I've never used it on a CD I've made--just played around a bit. It's nowhere near as bad as what RCA was doing in the 60's and 7's to 'rechannel' their mono recordings to stereo!