Editorial - Transferring records to computer

How to get the very best results   

I received an e-mail last week suggesting this topic, so I hope I'll be able to do it justice. I suspect much of what I'm about to write will be seen as common sense, but I know that what seems obvious to one person can be a new insight for someone else. I'll basically be running through how I do things here at Pristine and why, and I hope it'll be of some interest.

I'm going to start with the assumption that you already have the records you wish to transfer, be they LPs or 78s, and therefore the condition of them is predetermined.

To begin with I start with one of the most important yet easily dismissed procedures of all - cleaning the records. Over the years I experimented with all sorts of potions, products and techniques, the majority no better or worse than any other. What works consistently for me, and is without doubt worth every cent I've spent on it, is the range of Disc Doctor record cleaning products - their "Miracle Cleaner" and disc cleaning brushes. This really does have the ability to shift caked-on microscopic gunk from grooves of both LPs and 78s (and acetates) that nothing else I've ever tried can manage. Coupled with a vacuum cleaning machine your discs will never be cleaner and you've just saved yourself a huge amount of work and grief trying to clean this up after the event.

I've read a number of posts and e-mails in the past from people who've said "but it takes a long time" or "but it's too expensive" - well the time investment is about 1-2 minutes per side, and the cost is perhaps 5 cents a side. Not too much for the best possible results in my opinion! What's more, once this type of cleaning has been performed, thereafter you can generally rely on a carbon fibre brush to remove any light surface dust and won't need to repeat the wet-cleaning procedure again.

Now we move over to the record player. Again I'm going to assume your equipment is pretty well pre-defined. You have your turntable and some kind of pre-amplifier, either built into a main amplifier or separate. If you're playing 78s you may be aware of the different equalisation curves used by different record companies, something which also affects early LPs, and there are pre-amplifiers available which allow you to 'dial up' specific treble and bass equalisation curves. I've used a Graham Slee Jazz Club pre-amp for this purpose for a long time now - though the development of XR equalisation has pretty much rendered this unnecessary for me as I tend to try and fix all matters of EQ in one go after transfer.

What can make a difference though at this stage is the stylus. For 78rpm replay it really helps to have a cartridge which allows interchangable stylii, and with it a small selection of different profiles stylii. Changing the stylus width by the tiniest amount will allow it to ride a fraction higher or lower in the groove - potentially avoiding all sorts of issues, most usually excessive noise or swish. I few years ago I transferred some early UK Columbia sides for a Divine Art CD release which involved going incredibly low into the grooves in order to avoid persistent and overwhelming swishing. It took a number of goes to find the right stylus profile, but thankfully my suppliers at Expert Stylus in the UK were able to send a range to try with the understanding that I'd only pay for what I decided to keep - the rest went back at no extra charge.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, for vinyl - especially if you're wanting to transfer mono LPs. The grooves of the majority of 1950s LPs - and some mono releases later than this - were quite a bit wider than the stereo LPs which arrived in 1958. Thus a regular stereo stylus, some 30% narrower than its mono equivalent, may pick up a considerable amount of noise and muck in a mono groove. I'm lucky to have a turntable where two tonearms allow two different stylus profiles, one for mono and one for stereo, but if you don't have this facility and plan a lot of mono transfers, it would be worth investigating a special cartridge or stylus for this work and carrying it out all in one go before switching back to a conventional stereo stylus. Again, Expert Stylus are very helpful in this regard. They don't have a website, but you'll find contact details here.

By this stage you should have actually done a huge amount of the work - you have discs as clean as they can possibly be, such that their only shortcomings are down to the quality of the original pressings and the amount of wear they've suffered. You have the best replay stylus which is, of course, spotlessly clean (I bought a cheap handheld microscope a while ago which allows me to examine the tip of my stylus - a fascinating lesson in dust and dirt!).

There's just one last thing to check - is the disc you intend to transfer properly centred? An enormous number of records, especially but most certainly not exclusively in the 78rpm era, have off-centre spindle holes. This leads to your tonearm moving slightly from side to side during playback, and the pitch of the recording varying up and down with it. A lot of discs have a small degree of movement available from the centre hole, and it may be possible simply to adjust the placing of the record slightly on the turntable to prevent any tonearm swinging. If not, my solution involves the use of a small circular metal file with which I can file away a little of the vinyl or shellac from the side of the centre hole in the direction the disc needs to move. It's a tricky business of trial and error, but once it's done and you're ready to go you know you won't spend the next few years regretting you skipped this bit as you hear the warbling pitch of your otherwise lovely transfers.

Now you're ready to go. If you've not done so already you'll need to connect your turntable's output, via a suitable pre-amp, to your computer's sound card. How precisely you do this will depend on the sound card you have - ultimately you want to achieve a good input level which never, ever gets anywhere near overloading. If you have a variety of sources - records, tapes, cassettes - it may be worth investing in small inexpensive mixer from a company like Behringer which will allow you to control your sound levels precisely before they reach your sound card - depending on your amplifier set up this may also prevent a lot of regular replugging of cables, something I generally try to avoid.

You're now at the point where you start transferring music to your computer. For many years now I've used Adobe Audition (and its predecessor, Cool Edit Pro) for this job - it's an excellent editor and recording tool, but there are a lot of alternatives, many of which are a lot less expensive. As far as the job of recording is concerned, none is likely to be any better or worse than another, so use software which suits you and your wallet. The job of analogue to digital conversion is being done by your sound card and not your software, so if you want improvements at this stage in the process it's the hardware you need to consider, and again that's a potentially vast subject I'll avoid for the present article.

What I do think is important if you're going to do any declicking or otherwise clean up your transfers is to use high bit depths for all transfer and restoration work. A 16-bit transfer is fine if it's going straight to CD, but if you then start working on it using digital processing at 16 bits, every time you do anything to it you incur arithmetic rounding errors, effectively dropping the bit depth down. Your lovely transfer may end up being effectively a 12-bit recording as a result!

That's why I work using Adobe Auditions 32-bit floating point audio resolution, which consigns any numeric rounding errors to a volume level thousands of decibels below what will ever be heard or reproduced.

For many years I used Adobe Audition's built in declicker for all my record transfers, but more recently I've moved to a newer product, Izotope RX, which also handles hum removal, decrackling, noise reduction and hands on editing. It's a brilliant, powerful tool and I've heard no better, but it's not cheap - though far from the most expensive option out there. What you look for in a declicker is one which can excise as many clicks as possible without doing any damage to the music or leaving behind any residues or artefacts. This has proved surprisingly difficult to achieve, but other solutions are out there and you may find something which suits your needs for a lot less than you'll pay for RX.

I'm going to assume you're not going to go the full XR-remastering hog - there's perhaps a book to be written on that - and that because you look after your record collection you now have a lovely, declicked recording, ready to save and possibly transfer to CD.

I save my masters at 32-bit resolution, or as 24-bit FLACs for archiving. The difference between the two is really down to the different file formats at this level - no audio hardware will ever be capable of resolving the differences between the two. If I'm going to produce a CD I'll use a dither routine wihle reducing the bit depth, leaving a 16-bit file which for the purposes of human listening has properties closer to that of an 18-20 bit recording. The concept of dithering, what it does and why is once again beyond the scope of this article, but it's established practise and very well documented elsewhere.

Rather than splitting my finished WAV files into individual tracks I tend to keep them as complete albums, and work with a cue sheet just as we do with our MP3 files. I use Audition to add cue markers at the beginning of each track, then give each marker a title which matches that of the track. Cue List Tool is a handy little application for dealing with cue sheets and associating them with audio files. If your finished audio file is a 16-bit one you'll be able to burn it directly to CD using Nero or Roxio (or other CD writing software) using the cue sheet; if you wish to split your transfer into individual tracks on your computer you can do so either within Audition or using a cue splitter.

In conclusion, the most important part of the whole business here is to produce the very best possible replay of your record, and most of this happens long before you carry out the transfer. Having a spotless record, properly centred and being replayed on high quality equipment the sound of which pleases you is 90% of the work done. any half-way decent sound card will do an adequate transfer job, and if your vinyl is immaculate you'll not need too much declicking.

And of course if you have a really troublesome but otherwise truly brilliant recording, which is unavailable on CD and cannot be found on a better copy, and was released more than 50 years go, it might just be worth mentioning it to me...



Andrew Rose, May 20, 2011