Your Vinyl Transfer Workflow (sharing best needledrop practices)*

A what motherboard?

 

This week our studio received an album to master unto CD.. Unfortunately, the master and all copies are gone. We managed to get a 7.5 ips copy somebody made of the mint album back in 1975. We also have a cassette someone made off of a copy tape. The tape is Type 3 with no Dolby B. We also have a West German copy of the record from 1974. Not fun guys. It will probably be an edit of all 3.

The vinyl I sent to my sister to transfer. Rosie adjusts the RTA for every record. She has a list of cutting engineers and their preferred cutting angles.


Ahhhhhh, the Joys of the migraine.

We also received serval pre-RIAA 78 RPMs. Ahh the joy of it all. That is for a different project of course.

 

I think too the crosstalk it's from preamp.

By the way, I found the most transparent de-rumble thing is a Chebychev 1 high pass filter as in Adobe Audition 3.0. Cutoff 17 Hz, order 6, pass riple 0. If anyone wants to play around with this filter I would be happy for a second opinion.

 

Interesting. I'll give it a try. Thanks.

 

Well, the medium itself can provide perfect sound forever. It's producers and mastering engineers who can't.

 

Except for those CDs from the 80s with rotting labels that render them no longer playable.

 

Do you have any of these damaged disc's? I would love to see a photo of one.

 

I had a couple of CDs that no longer played or ripped properly as well as a couple of DVDs with the same problems. Here are a couple of articles on the topic.

The Hidden Phenomenon That Could Ruin Your Old Discs

Worried About Disc Rot? Here's How To Look After Your CDs | Discogs

Let's not threadcrap by turning this into a long discussion of CD rot. There are several threads on here that mention CD rot; just do a search in the main forum.

 

True. But when CD came out it was harsh and bright. Not anywhere near perfect.

 

Let's not threadcrap by turning this into a long discussion of CD rot. There are several threads on here that mention CD rot; just do a search in the main forum.[/QUOTE]

And, let's not turn this into a bunch of self-righteous posts on how ripping is illegal.

 

And, let's not turn this into a bunch of self-righteous posts on how ripping is illegal.[/QUOTE]

CD rot? What is that? Agreed.
Huh? Who here is lecturing us on CD ripping?
Did I skip a page?

All good points Grant.

 

For those who are reading way too much into my posts. Listen audiophile buddies:

I should say the sound of early CD players were crap. The CD itself has proven itself. I have CDs from 1988 that still play like day one.

 

And, let's not turn this into a bunch of self-righteous posts on how ripping is illegal.[/QUOTE]Indeed. This is a thread about sharing vinyl transfer workflow, so it's always good to nudge it back on track. I've been here now for 15 years and seen way too many useful thread get torpedoed and Grant I know you've been here a lot longer so I'm sure you've seen more than I have.

 

I took some time to test the Chebychev filter. Although I own Audition 3, I haven't had it installed for awhile now. I have Audition 2021 on my one of my PCs here and it still has the Chebychev filter as part of the Scientific filter. I did a comparison between it using the settings you specified and the same thing using RX and just selecting frequencies from 17 to 0 Hz and deleting them. I then took each result and Alt+V inverted mix pasted it with the original to obtain the null result so we can see what was removed or changed.

Here's the original (side 2 of the wall untreated raw recording from the test I did in response to ghostrider's post this weekend).


Here's what's different when I mix paste the file processed with the Chebychev filter in Audition:


Here's what's different when I mix paste the file with 17 to 0Hz selected and deleted in RX:

As you can see nothing has been removed in RX but 17 to 0 Hz whereas with Audition's Chebychev high pass filter set to 17Hz 6th order, 0 ripple, there is a lot of audio information removed or changed. I would suggest that RX is a lot more transparent. The Audition result file still has the same amount of audible background noise when I play it back so there's no audible rumble removal. The file does sound different, (a bit thinner) probably because of all the stuff that's being removed or changed in the midrange (phase is the usual suspect).

Sorry, Bob, but I'll stick with simple deletion in RX for removing infrasonic frequencies. I know some folks leave them there but I remove them because we humans can't really hear them (some folks think they can but I trust the scientists), speakers can't reproduce them, and there's no musical content down there anyway, it's just noise and junk that's using up data for no good reason!

 

Nice job on comparing the two. You might recall years back I was deleting 0-17 hz it was fast and easy. I stopped doing it when I started denoising. I liked how the file looked gave me the illusion that the farthest reaching bass was left intact. Bob's denoising from back then looked impressive also. I still think over doing it with denoise will remove subtle things. If you don't ever look for it you will never know it has been removed.
I'm sitting on the couch rerecording all my 180g records. Since buying my new Prime I learned just how sensitive my XX2 is being able to raise the VTA I now realize my Scout never was set up to play them right. They all at times while playing had a kind of raspy sound. I thought not knowing any better that this was the whole reissue thing.

 

We were fine up until 1997. Or 1995 at least. My Paul Stanley solo record CD mastered in 1997 sounds just like the vinyl.

 

BTW, by hum problem disappeared. I'm beginning to think someone around me (apartment) had something plugged in that was causing it.

 

I had a few commercial CDs and DVDs go unreadable without mishandling that I'm aware of. Of course that doesn't mean the format is bad. Any man-made object can suffer from damage, and nobody ever claimed CDs were exempt.

 

When my neighbours use their microwave while I'm needledropping there's a big patch of noise just above 20kHz. I can't hear it, but it's still there.

 

My CD of George Harrison's Cloud Nine got scratched while still in the case inside the George Harrison Dark Horse Years Box Set! A few months ago I tried to rip it to flac and the damn thing wouldn't work. I tried a different computer, another CD reader, nothing worked. For whatever reason I turned it downside up and voilà, there's a deep 3mm scratch on the playable surface I'd never seen before. I don't think I'd ever played it since I bought the box new. And then I thought:
"I'm going to needledrop my records before they go bust".

 

The first time I noticed a CD was loud was the Red Hot Chili Peppers' One Hot Minute from 1995. It all went downhill from there.

 

The way I see it, CD-R deterioration is a good reason to store needledrops on hard drives instead of burning them to disk. There are a considerable number of old-school types who still prefer to write CD-Rs, but it's a gamble.

 

Yes, especially since the articles I've read about CD failure indicate that CD-Rs are more prone than commercial CDs.

Also important to have a backup of hard drives as they can fail too. I've had a couple of hard drives including a recent case of a 2 year-old 2TB external drive giving up the ghost without warning. Some of us put a lot of effort and time into our needledrops so it's a shame to lose that work.

 

I currently keep two backups each of the FLACS and the mp3 on spinner drives. The main FLAC drive is an internal spinner, and the rest are external USB drives. Out of all the enthusiasm I have for SSD, I am still a bit iffy about archiving things on them. Why? This is still my relative first experience with them. I am a very heavy user and worry about how long the thing will last before the data fades. But, I have USB thumb drives with 20 data on them that work just fine. I am very careful to always leave 20% of space.

 

I used to worry a lot about SSDs as I've been using them for a couple of years now (I just added a Samsung NVME M.2 drive to my regular day-to-day computer and did a fresh Win10 install and the speed is amazing!). Samsung has a utility called Magician that provides an estimated lifespan and lets just say at my age of 61, I don't think I need worry about outlasting them according to Samsung.