Digitizing LPs: General advice wanted

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.

Buzzing around the net, I came across some info about the Terratec Phono Preamp and Studio software. I haven't used it, only read about it.

http://www.terratec.net/press/pressemit/ppa-studio.htm

http://www.proaudioreview.com/par/november00/TerraTec-Web.shtml

I've been burning my LP collection to CD's for about 18 Months. I've been using the "Tape Out" on my Receiver to the "Line In" of my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound card on my PC. Then, I record the whole thing using Cool Edit 2000.

I've been using an Ortofon MC20 with the transformer, into a Marantz 2270, so the analog input is fairly accurate.

The whole set up seems to work very weel as I can critique the finished product on my Living Room System with impressive results (a/d/s L1590's driven by Carver TFM 55x's)

If you want to add the ability to edit the digitized copy,I recommend Cool Edits' Noise Reduction add on for another $40.