Your Vinyl Transfer Workflow (sharing best needledrop practices)*

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

  1. DickLaurentIsDead

    DickLaurentIsDead Forum Resident

    These are the only things I soft limit.
    I mean, these spikes are a tiny fraction of a second, they are not clicks.
    I find it highly unlikely the human ear can detect a soft limited spike which is only small fraction of a second.
     
  2. Grant

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

    But, I take time to extensively listen. If I feel like the loud handclaps are worth keeping as they are, I will abandon the idea.

    Some people may ask why go through all that trouble? Well, I take sound quality very seriously. Even if i'm going to play the mp3 version in the car, I am serious about it. My main purpose for doing needledrops is to archive my vinyl in the digital realm. To me, archive means to have the best representation possible. Others aren't particular. They just want to hear the music in the car or while walking.

    Again with noise shaping: I used to take as much as a week deciding on the best noise shaping for each track. Now that i've abondoned the noise shaping, I just use one flat dither setting for all of my drops, and they now sound much more transparent than they did when I used the shaping. Good thing I saved the 24-bit versions of some of my drops so I can go back and do a new dither process. But, I also found that I was so obsessed with finding the best noise shaping that I don't have to redo anything. :)

    Maybe it's my OCD.
     
    Last edited: Sep 7, 2018
    ghost rider likes this.
  3. Grant

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

    I am an audiophile and know what to listen for. I could hear the difference. I don't live my life according to what some scientists number say. I live by what I can hear. If I can hear a difference, I will not soft limit or anything.
     
    ghost rider likes this.
  4. DickLaurentIsDead

    DickLaurentIsDead Forum Resident

    What do you hear in a soft limit vs your solution for rogue spikes?
    Do you think you could still detect it in a rip from an LP you are not familiar with?
     
  5. Grant

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

    One solution may sound better than the other. Sometimes, neither solution will sound better than just leaving it alone. That means in some cases, the resulting vinyl rip that will be relatively lower in volume than others. That's the way it is.

    Yes, because I will repeatedly listen to the passage with the spike in it and experiment. I treat all of my rips the same way, regardless of if I know or care about the music or not.

    Doing needledrops is a laborious task, one I am willing to spend time on, but it's well worth the trouble. I enjoy the process. I always appreciate the effort years down the road.
     
  6. Robert C

    Robert C Forum Resident

    Location:
    London, UK
    One could eliminate the question of normalising by just setting the input gain on one's ADC such that it reproduces a test disc signal (say -20 dB pink noise) appropriately. Once one has a known reference volume the peak level of the resulting needledrops will reflect the loudness of their source.
     
    Grant likes this.
  7. harby

    harby Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    That won't result in the optimum digital record level for varied sources, though. Take a 45 RPM 12" dance single mastered by Herbie "Pump" Powers, it's going to be very hot. Then put on a 30 minute side of a classical compilation from the 1970s, the levels will be significantly lower.

    If you were going to set the levels and not mess with them, it would be the loudest record you've got that would be the volume reference. Even 16 bit has enough dynamic range that a low vinyl recording level doesn't matter much, except in theory.

    Setting record level only matters if your sound interface has an analog volume or an analog gain control chip before the ADC stage. With some sound cards, the recording level is only software, with the line inputs connected directly to the digital converter, and no way of reducing a clipped input signal. On such a card, overdriving the input with test tones but turning down the record level reveals the clipping. You'd want to set such a card's level where it is likely bit-perfect,by setting the level at 50%, 0dB, etc depending on the card, or by setting the clipping level to 0dB. Then adjust your phono gain stage if it has that control.
     
    Last edited: Sep 8, 2018
  8. Robert C

    Robert C Forum Resident

    Location:
    London, UK
    Yes, the levels captured in the digital transfer will reflect the unique loudness profile of the recording.
    Difficult when you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of items! Even for the hobbyist needledropper, what happens when you buy a new record that's louder than all the others?
     
  9. ghost rider

    ghost rider Forum Resident

    Location:
    Bentonville AR
    Hey guys so I had a had a revelation last night that once and for all that I should never used RX6 declick for large areas no matter the setting. I used to use ClickRepair at level 2 on records that have a lot clicks but I got into the habit of using RX6 single band at 0.7 (both settings are the 2nd lowest possible setting for each program) So I was working on Donald Fagen The Nightfly last night and one track a time I was using declick at 0.7 and the sax became severely distorted.

    These are 30 second samples 1st unprocessed; 2nd declick at 0.7 and the 3rd ClickRepair at 2, all in the same file.
    RX6 declicking error.wav (66.74MB) - SendSpace.com

    I have seen this before it is very rare not sure why it happens everything else sound fine. So from this point forward RX6 will only be used for manual declicking which every needle drop is done manually but on the ones that have a lot I'm back to using ClickRepair to lighten the work load.
     
    quicksrt likes this.
  10. ghost rider

    ghost rider Forum Resident

    Location:
    Bentonville AR
    So I finished the Donald Faden what do you make of this screenshot as I was setting it up for the sub bass removal.

    Donald-Fagen-sub-bass

    At beginnings of sides a and b basically during the 1at track there is resonance that appears to go up beyond 50hz in regular cycles. Sounds fine just never saw something like this.
     
    quicksrt likes this.
  11. jmobrien68

    jmobrien68 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toms River, NJ
    I've had problems with RX's declick and horn distortion in the past as well.
     
  12. Packgrog

    Packgrog Forum Resident

    Try to only use iZotope's declicker on the smallest passages possible. It's extremely effective, and better than ClickRepair in actually repairs, but any overzealous use is going to cause distortion. Better to put more effort into cleaning the vinyl itself anyway if you can.
     
    The_Windmill likes this.
  13. ghost rider

    ghost rider Forum Resident

    Location:
    Bentonville AR
    I do clean my records about as clean as they can get. Used records will have surface noise. ClickRepair does a great job of lighting up the work load and then I listen all the way through with headphones removing anything left with RX. As jmobrien68 said RX can have issues with horns I have found this to be true. It happens very rarely even when you work with a small file. As in my case. The sample I posted will show it. You could see for yourself.
     
  14. Packgrog

    Packgrog Forum Resident

    You're using ClickRepair AND iZotope for declicking? No wonder you're getting distortion. Even with declick level of 0 on a 32/192 file there's still some slight alterations to the original file in ClickRepair. Subtle, but it happens. What settings you use in ClickRepair matter as well. I would recommend either learning to live with some noise or with the tedium of manually declicking only audible clicks in iZotope by selecting just the click itself and keeping the declick level as low as possible (I have noticed that "Thump" detection is more effective than "Click" for loud pops, BTW).

    Another trick for really obnoxious, loud clicks/pops is to just select the click itself and delete it from the waveform entirely. Since iZotope changes the working waveform to 32-bit float on the first edit, I do this in Audition when splitting tracks, as cuts/deletes do not alter anything else about the waveform beyond just removing samples. I usually just live with the rest when listening to hi-res, and run declicking on noticeable clicks and quiet passages (ie: track gaps) when converting to a lower sample rate for portable listening.
     
  15. jmobrien68

    jmobrien68 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toms River, NJ
    I use both as well... for a general album in very good shape I will do a two pass run with click repair on low settings (reverse and then forward)... then I will listen for isolated clicks and zoom in and fix them with iZotope's declick.
    But... if I have an album in bad shape, especially with quiet passages (for example right now I am working on a thrift store mono copy of Cactus Jim and the Wranglers Western Christmas album)... I will do my Click Repair two pass and might even run a whole song through the iZotope's declick... and as long as there's no brass/horns they sound fine for my purposes... as I mentioned in previous posts, these needle drops are for me so all I strive for is to please myself.
     
    quicksrt likes this.
  16. Packgrog

    Packgrog Forum Resident

    If you're going to go to that extreme, I'd recommend doing it all in iZotope. Do a first pass with a really low declick setting (ie: 0.5 - 1.0, Click), then bump it up to something heavier for remaining noise and track gaps (3.0, Thump), using the highest resolution original file that you can stand to work with (higher res makes edits less audible). I suspect you'd have better results overall than with using ClickRepair at all. Even 0.5 Click can cause audible changes, but is more effective and less damaging overall than ClickRepair (IMO).
     
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  17. jeffmackwood

    jeffmackwood Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ottawa
    Since all but a handful of the vinyl LPs in my collection are available digitally already, I've only needed to digitize three or four of them.

    With but a minor hiccup or two, I've now settled on a pretty simple process.

    The vinyl section in my main HT looks like

    Stanton 681EEE Cartridge > Yamaha P-850 turntable > NAD 1130 Pre-amp > Pioneer RG-1 Dynamic Range Expander > SAE 500 Impulse Noise Reduction System

    From the SAE I use an Audio2USB device to connect to a USB input on a laptop.

    I use Audacity to record both sides of the album, all in one go as a single WAV file.

    I then move that file over to my desktop (more horsepower) and use Wave Editor to extract individual tracks, named appropriately.

    I then use Any Audio Converter to produce 320MP3 files from those tracks, and I then import those 320MP3s into iTunes which I find to be a convenient platform with which to enter metadata.

    Done.

    Even in 320MP3 format, I find that the resulting tracks, after the removal of clicks and pops and with the addition of 12 dB of dynamic range, sound much better, to me, than the original vinyl tracks.

    Jeff
     
    harby likes this.
  18. miguelfcp

    miguelfcp Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Portugal
    Hi guys.

    Noob here. Just want to start transfer my vinyl records to digital format so I can listen everywhere and have all the dynamic range that CD versions usually don't have.

    My turntable is a Rega Planar 1 and it's connected to an old amp (Pionneer) which has phono input.

    So far what I did was:

    1º Connect my amp (jack 6.5 output) to line-in port on my PC.

    2º Recorded in 96Khz with audacity both sides of a record and save them as WAV 32 bit float.

    Now what should I do?
     
  19. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    Drop it down to 24 bit.
    I manually cut them, saving each as 01, 02, 03 etc. Convert to FLAC
    And use mp3tag to name. They have a handy little tool where you can insert the discogs ID #.
     
    punkmusick likes this.
  20. punkmusick

    punkmusick Amateur drummer

    Location:
    Brazil
    If the input to Audacity is too low even with recording volume at maximum, is there a way to increase volume of the file after recording?
     
  21. miguelfcp

    miguelfcp Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Portugal
    And no process ? Like remove DC Offset, amplification, volume normalization, filters??
     
    c-eling likes this.
  22. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    Nothing...
    my offsets are so minimal i'd never notice.
    When I do happen to check, they are usually 0.001 % of each other.
     
  23. miguelfcp

    miguelfcp Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Portugal
    And what about removing the pops and clicks?
     
  24. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    Clickrepair and a lot of luck you obtain a quiet record :laugh:
     
  25. miguelfcp

    miguelfcp Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Portugal

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