Vinyl LPs To CD

For me, there is NOTHING that will solve the solution as you state it, Johnny, "a sonic transfer that preserves the beauty of my vinyl LPs". That being said, there are some credible options, depending on your budget, and how picky you will be with the outcome.

I had a rather "run-of-the-mill" Philips CDR880 that did a surprisingly VERY nice job of transferring some of my vinyl to CD's. I have since given the Philips to my son for use at college after having received a Pinoeer PD-RV500 as a Christams gift. I really like the sound obtained from vinyl to CD transfer, the resluts are much richer than soem of the other units I tried, including the TASCAm, which I didn't care much for.

As Sugarbie says, though, you can always take the plunge and buy more expensive and exacting separates which will give you incrementally better results. As always, it depends on how these improvements cross the graph of your incremetnal budget!!

I have also been dabbling with recording from vinyl to CD using my PC with encouraging results, but that is another story altogether.

I have a friend whom I've made some transfers with. He has all separates. His transfers are excellent. I am glad to hear they're are making some recorders with decent built-in converters.

If your purpose is getting best quality archives, do it with a PC. Get a high-end sound card and record .wav files onto your HD at 24/96, then record CD-R's. It will take 2 or 3 CD-R's per LP, but sonics will be FAR better than any CD recorder at 16/44.1. Playback from the digital outputs of the card through a good DAC. I use a Digital Audio Labs 'Card deLuxe' played back through Sonic Frontiers SFD-2 MK III, Krell, big Maggies etc and it works superbly well.

This approach will come closer to preserving the sonic beauty than you you can imagine. I can't hear any difference at all. Obviously such CD's are useless for other purposes, like car or diskman. If you want redbook CD's you can down-sample the HD recording in software to 16/44.1. Cool Edit and other packages work fine. Make sure your PC has many gigs of fast HD space!

-Dave

I've had great luck using a Pioneer PDR-05. Makes very decent sounding CDs from LPs. It also uses the Stable Platter Mechanism, which is kinda like a turntable anyway. :-) It also makes a really nice transport. I bought it in really nice shape on eBay for a very reasonable proce. If you have any particular questions, e-mail me.
Good Luck!
Ed

My NAD 660 CD recorder has an A/D converter. All I need to do is plug the phone IC's into the analog inputs on the back of the recorder and voila! I have not tried it yet but I bought this unit B-stock for $495. Based in the comments above, there are several ways to do it, complicated, easy, you just have to decide how much you want to spend and what quality you want.