Vinyl LPs To CD

Sony's 33 and 66 has SBM built in and I think you can get the 33 for $450

I use the Sony W33 pro CDR (I think I paid $479 late last year) and it does a very good job. It has 24/96 A/D - D/A conversion and it also has Sony's SBM dithering(?) technology as an option. I'm sure a nice Apogee A/D converter would sound better than the internal Sony converters, but they're friggin expensive. I'm not sure how much of an upgrade a $799 MSB unit would be, but it's probably noticeable. You can spend thousands on seperate components if you want the very best, or you can spend $450-$600 for a Sony, Tascam, Marantz, or HHB pro model and get pretty good results out of the box. And yes...go directly from the phono preamp into the recorder, if possible. Keep the signal path as short and pure as possible.

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