Your Vinyl Transfer Workflow (sharing best needledrop practices)*

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Vocalpoint, May 11, 2011.

  1. Grant

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

    There are so many ways to tackle crackle, but the best way is to clean the record or try to find a different copy. I sometimes have better luck reducing crackle with NR/hiss removal in Audition.
     
    arisinwind likes this.
  2. Stan94

    Stan94 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Paris, France
    I tried both, I've had good results with declicking, but it takes time to find the right settings (not too aggressive, not too weak).
    Thanks for your help guys.
     

  3. Try using declick and/or de-crackle from other programs if you have others. I found not all functions are the same from program to program.
     
    Grant likes this.
  4. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    Myth. My Rega 3 has no ground wire and no connector for ground wire either. Apparently well designed turntables DON'T NEED a ground wire.
     
  5. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    Rumble will cover up detail. And no, that isn't a good design. A MK-1200 Mark 1 is a good direct drive turntable. That looks like a piece of mass produced plastic that UHF magazine used to Knock.
     
  6. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    Many DBX encoded recordings have issues with them.
     
  7. Stan94

    Stan94 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Paris, France
    Sometimes I wonder if, for all its qualities, the main flaw with the AT-VM540ML is that it picks up too much debris that lie in the grooves and may be forgotten by more forgiving styluses.
     
  8. Grant

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

    That's one of the reasons I like the microline styli profile. It digs deep into the grooves and indeed can bypass a lot of the dirt and damage on records.
     
    Lownote30 and john morris like this.
  9. raphph

    raphph Taking a trip on an ocean liner…

    Location:
    London
    I’ve found the Waves X-Crackle plugin to be better than RX for crackle.
     
    Lownote30 likes this.
  10. Stan94

    Stan94 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Paris, France
    I was ready to purchase 2 or 3 plugins from Waves a few months ago but I read that they don't integrate in RX. They only work as standalone software, which I don't like.
     
  11. Grant

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

    And I don't have Waves money,
     
    john morris likes this.
  12. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    I have been saying this for years.....
     
  13. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    Be creative Grant.....Take up a collection.
     
  14. raphph

    raphph Taking a trip on an ocean liner…

    Location:
    London
    How do I convert my standard Left / Right Channel wave file on RX to Mid/Side processing - and then convert it back to L/R again after I've made my edits?
     
  15. Grant

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

    In the mixing module, there is an encoding preset and a decoding preset. So, you use encoding before, and decoding for when you are done.
     
    raphph likes this.
  16. Stan94

    Stan94 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Paris, France
    Y
    You beat me to it!
     
    Grant likes this.
  17. harby

    harby Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    I've done a bunch of work and mods making my background noise absolutely black. Now we're down to the final frontier - surface noise

    Pulled near-new 1994 BMG/RCA vinyl out of the crate. Lucky if I played this side once, and it was more pop-free than your average new record. So I gave it a needle drop - and then on silent groove, gave it a meticulous hand-repair of every little crackle. What's left is surface noise. Vinyl is just appalling...

    Have a listen: 3 seconds of cue-up over a running platter, 5 seconds of needle down (volume pre-cranked warning)

    surfacenoise.flac (0.7MB)

    Linear and log analysis:
    [​IMG]

    Time to get out the smoke juice and add wet play to the regimen?
     
  18. Maybe try a double pass of spectral noise reduction?
     
  19. harby

    harby Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    De-crackling the noise snippet is indeed with the intent of making a noise reduction profile. It is just that this is definitely in "could affect the sound" territory needing careful tempering (although the noise, even unreduced, is easily masked by music - it just remains sounding like vinyl).
     
  20. BrilliantBob

    BrilliantBob Select, process, CTRL+c, CTRL+z, ALT+v

    Location:
    Romania
    With peak at 13 Hz that noise looks more like the tonearm resonant frequency than the vinyl surface noise. And sounds like something is scratching the groove. Bad stylus settings?
     
  21. harby

    harby Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    Yes, that's the raw noise. Just ranting mostly, that fretting over what dither to use or the dynamic range of your ADC is quite pointless; even after subsonic filtering, there's 28dB more noise with the needle in the groove.

    I have no stylus settings on a linear tracker. Playing a NKOTB 45 single thirty times as a test - the after is indistinguishable. It's simply just the sound of a diamond scraping over plastic at 1.1 MPH.

    For reference, here's the same noise (the literal needle-dropping noise) at normal volume plus some boring music, after 25% speed-up processing including subsonic filtering, with automated de-click, and 6dB reduction based on the electronic-only noise reduction profile.

    enchanted-sample.flac

    ...which I think is pretty impressive, since on the phono pre, this is what a 390 ohm dummy load instead of the turntable sounds like here in the city:

    loadnoise.flac
     
    stetsonic likes this.
  22. I've used wet playing to save the music on noisy vinyl. It definitely works.
     
  23. harby

    harby Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    Well, I got another chance to try out low speed transferring on something else that needed improvement. Result - improvement!

    Elisa_Fiorillo-Heartache-old-v-new.flac (2.2MB)

    Eight seconds of my 2012 "drop", vs today's low-capacitance recording. Significantly less siblance mistracking. Significantly less overpronounced highs.
     
  24. ghost rider

    ghost rider Forum Resident

    Location:
    Bentonville AR
    It's noticeable. So you slowed down your TT and double the sampling without resampling? It's not an option for me but looks like it's working for you.
     
  25. harby

    harby Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    It is if you've got 45s...

    While, yes, I correct it within 0.001dB, interestingly, the difference in RIAA EQ isn't as dramatic as one would think. Even playing a 45 at 33, the correction needed after speeding it up 1.35x in software:

    [​IMG]

    --


    I figured out how to do mid-side in SoX. I had a dream where someone on this forum provided me the answer (to the ignored SoX post on the previous page). Surprise, woke up, was correct! Turns out the mixer filter's invert function's level is equivalent to "power", not "volume", and also power is not "power" but equivalent to "digital voltage", so needs a different value.

    This allows "workflow", the topic of the thread, to truly be one command.

    So I've been playing with biquad filters one might apply in mid-side mode, such as summing bass to mono, notching 60Hz, subsonic highpass...

    [​IMG]

    Above, the gentle series of curves are two passes of 2nd order 30Hz Butterworth highpass (blue, Q=0.707), followed by the curves of more resonant Qs of 0.75, 0.80, 0.85.

    The ridiculous sharp subsonic filter is one tweaked result: 10th order 30Hz Butterworth (x2 - for a second reverse pass), with the 9th/10th order Q increased to give a bit of bass boost before sharper cutoff.
     
    Last edited: May 23, 2021
    stetsonic and anorak2 like this.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine