Pure Vinyl Software

The only downside I see to the Duet is that it doesn't offer Digital IO, which means you can't add a better AD converter later if you wanted to. You probably won't care though since it is an Apogee and it already has a pretty great AD converter built in. Apogee is a higher end pro audio product and is known for it's sound quality above all. I think it's the no brainer choice for what you want. There is a PreSonus fire box that could be had for 300 bucks, but I would guess it won't sound nearly as good. If you wanted to spend more (probably not) then check out the Metric Halo ULN 2.

I will be real interested to see how this works. I may be following your lead if this works easy and sounds great. My setup sounds great for sure but is not the most convenient.

That Apogee and a laptop is portable as well. You can buy it from Sweetwater sound, they are pretty good to deal with.

Also check out the E-MU 0404 http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/0404USB/ for a USB alternative. It's cheaper. I'd still go with the Apogee.

Unless your vinyl is extremely noisy, so many clicks and pops that you hear more of them than music, I'd not use any software cleaning. Any declicking you do will have audible effects on the music. Also the better built the turntable and cart, the less likely the clicks and pops will bother you. Now if this is something rare, that you need the cleanest sounding results possible, I would remove the clicks and pops manually. Software such as Adobe Audtion will let you do this.

Here's what I do when transfering vinyl:

First I clean the LP on a VPI 16.5 RCM. I also use a quality turntable/cart/preamp combo (VPI,SHURE,Dynavector) and a quality sound card (m-audio audiophile firewire).

You can use any sound recording program, if going to cd, I'd record straight to 16/44khz, if archving for digital storage not on cd, go for 24/96 then compress to a lossless codec such as flac.

I started blogging about the Pure Vinyl experience. You can check out the progress here:

http://www.wynacht.org/?p=149

Would the MSB PAD Professional A/D Converter produce better sound than the Apogee Duet?

Thanks,
Joe