Digitizing LPs: General advice wanted

I've recorded at least l00 LPs to CD. It's both easier and harder than you think. I'd forget the 24/96 requirement though. And I'd go with a professional CD recorder like my TASCAM CDRW700 rather than one of the "consumer" units that restrict your ability to do digital dubs and use computer CDRs. The TASCAM goes for $450 at Oade Bros. It's easy to use, but the hard (or time-consuming) part of recording LPs is that you have to manually insert a track marker at the end of every tune if you want to be able to access each tune rather than each side of an LP. This means you have to listen as you record; that's the time-consuming part. Good luck.

Hi Captain and Scott; Yep I own and like the Marantz Pro CDR500, and consider that the easiest way to record LPs, but then I've never used a computer "burner".

As far as I know, there is no recorder that records at 24/96, as there is no player that outputs a 24/96 digital signal. Will computer DVD burners record at 24/96 or 192? I don't think so. So, what you really need is a CD recorder that has an excellent analog to digital to converter.

Several months ago, M. Fremer of Stereophile Magazine compared 3 "consumer grade" CD recorders and found that they all made very good digital to digital copies, but the most expensive one was the only one that did well going from analog to digital (I believe it was a more expensive Denon that Fremer thought did AD conversion quite well-- you might want to look for this review as M. Fremer is a big analog guy).

For your purposes, the key(s) will be the quality of the Analog to Digital converter (in the CD recorder) , ie from your TT (analog) to the CD burner (digital) and the connectors/cable. If you get a CD-Recorder with a good AD converter you should be happy with the results as you'll still have "ticks and pops" to keep you smiling;>). Good Luck. Craig

I was posting at the same time as Dopogue. I agree with his advice. I also considered the TASCAM pro machine-- the Marantz was $675. from BSW in Tacoma, WA. And he's right on about how tedious the recording process is when going from LP to CD. Cheers. Craig

Despite some of the subsequent responses, I believe the original poster is trying only to archive the material in 24/96, not make CD's for convenient playback. If this is the case, it's not something I know much about, but maybe a trip to a pro sound shop would be in order? This seems like a lot of data to be stored, so maybe a hard-disk or tape-based system would be needed (or can the new DVD burners do 24/96 DVD-A?). Whatever is used for data storage, the A-to-D will still have to sound good, so try to audition a couple of solutions at home if possible. Good luck, let us know what you find!

Cap'n, it's important to know how you'll playback your digitized music for there are negative sonic effects associated with sample rate conversion. For instance, if 44.1kHz is your final playback sample rate, then your music will sound better if digitized at 44.1kHz rather than at 96kHz and down converted to 44.1kHz. Avoid SRC if at all possible. Whatever you do, record at a 24bit depth rate.

Despite the above comments which favor stand alone CDRs, computer based systems offer the potential for better sound quality and greater flexibility. The downside is that a good computer setup is fairly expensive. First, you'll need a fast computer (I prefer a Mac because of the better software selection), a pro-quality soundcard (the Lynx Two offers 192kHz A/D conversion) and vast amounts of hard disk space for file storage. For software I use t.c. works Spark XL, but there are others (Sound Forge, WaveLab, Peak). Such a system will approach $3,000, but it will sound better than and be able to do more than a simple CDR machine.