Prompt's TechBlog
Vinyl Solutions
30 January 2006
Posted by Dave Wilby
My name is Dave, and in the eighties and nineties I was an insatiable vinyl addict.
In the new millennium I may be getting older and fatter myself, but the equipment I now use to play music on is modern, svelte, and as completely incompatible with my old long players as I now find myself to be with the Top 40.
All of my vinyl is stacked in dusty boxes, taking up loft space alongside various generations of record players and 'music centres'. But it remains the best music I've ever owned, and it's frustrating to replace it piecemeal with painfully trawled digital downloads each time the old tunes spring to mind.
And I'm not alone - many of my friends, even the really geeky ones, bemoan the loss of their vinyl memories and complain that legal download sites simply don't encode the range of music they're after. All this despite the fact that deep down they know that with a PC, an old Hi-Fi and a suitable tangle of cables there must be a simple solution out there.
This featurette from BBC Technology digs deeper, unearthing the GF-350 turntable / CD-R combo from Teac that just screams 'birthday present', as well as discussing the dark art of hooking up phono pre-amps and record deck outputs to boost record signal levels. Be careful how much of the advice you follow though - Sonic Solutions for example is in the business of removing all the hisses, crackles and pops from analogue transfer, and surely those are some of the best bits?
In the new millennium I may be getting older and fatter myself, but the equipment I now use to play music on is modern, svelte, and as completely incompatible with my old long players as I now find myself to be with the Top 40.
All of my vinyl is stacked in dusty boxes, taking up loft space alongside various generations of record players and 'music centres'. But it remains the best music I've ever owned, and it's frustrating to replace it piecemeal with painfully trawled digital downloads each time the old tunes spring to mind.
And I'm not alone - many of my friends, even the really geeky ones, bemoan the loss of their vinyl memories and complain that legal download sites simply don't encode the range of music they're after. All this despite the fact that deep down they know that with a PC, an old Hi-Fi and a suitable tangle of cables there must be a simple solution out there.
This featurette from BBC Technology digs deeper, unearthing the GF-350 turntable / CD-R combo from Teac that just screams 'birthday present', as well as discussing the dark art of hooking up phono pre-amps and record deck outputs to boost record signal levels. Be careful how much of the advice you follow though - Sonic Solutions for example is in the business of removing all the hisses, crackles and pops from analogue transfer, and surely those are some of the best bits?
# posted by Dave Wilby at 11:04 AM 
Comments:
Allow me to recommend RIP Vinyl as a cheap and effective program for copying records to your PC. I couldn't get the automatic track selection working (probably too many clicks and pops on my records), but it was easy to use.
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