Why do you guys do so much vinyl ripping?

[NeilP]

Try Click Repair. See if you like the difference.

I find it dos not affect the sound at all...apart from removing the clicks.

it is almost as if you have gone through and removed the clicks manually.

I do not have a great top end system, so cant comment on play back on really top end systems, but to my modest ear and system it does a great job

Neil

[Whitneyville]

Well, nobody has released the 8 "Symbol of Quality" bootlegged LP's of "Big Brother and the Holding Company" fronted by "The Pearl". The old acid-rock albums will never be made into CD's becase the master's were burned-up. 700,000 78 wax masters were taken to the Camden, NJ dump and driven over with a compactor (I saw it on ABC evening News) when BGM/SONY bought out RCA. At Nashville, it took nearly months to burn all the master tapes RCA had on file, and they can never be re-released on CD. RCA alone destroyed over 3.5 million masters when BMG/SONY took over, including several masters than were still in their top 500 seller's catalog. Example: RCA Victor Floyd Cramer's "Last Date". The way I archive my 78's is for the best possible preservation. And there are NO lossless formats. Rip down a well liked piece of music 100 times deep in a "lossless" format, then tell me it sounds the same. Actually, more importantly show me an oscilliscope trace of one on the "X" axis and the other on the "Y" axis (sycronized) and we should see a perfect un-moving circle on the scope. It won't happen. I also won't pay organized crime (who runs it) for "downloads" of music. I have some 78's the United States Library of Congress didn't have (not supposed to be possible) I found out when I was researching the records. I supplied them with 15 IPS "half-speed" mastered R-T-R tapes, and recieved free lifetime search and query rights in exchange. I've never recorded vinyl to CD, but I think I do that very thing to my Eagles collection. Probably will make CD's of all my Hank Williams Sr. 78's/12" EP 45's and LP's. Most of mine aren't MGM labels either.

x"

[wordslinger]

I'd like to put a bit of my own two cents in here. One reason why people should rip their vinyl albums is because a lot of new cd's aren't mastered well at all. Do a google search of the 'Loudness War', and you'll see the kind of crap that record companies are doing in regards to cd audio quality. Of course, it's most prevalent in newly recorded music, but it also happens with old music. Basically music gets 'squashed', in order to fit it into the somewhat modest headroom given by digital compact discs. That means that volume gets equalized, which removes a great deal of the 'dynamic' audio present in the original recording. Not all cd's are bad, but many of them are. In the end, it just means that the original vision that the band and producers had for that music in 1960, or 1970, is flattened, lifeless. In layman's terms, a lot of music was originally recorded with many differences in volume. Take classical music, for example.... so much of the emotion in classical music comes from a few very quiet notes followed by a raucous crescendo. With 'volume normalized' music, the difference between the loud and quiet parts becomes less noticeable, therefore taking away from the emotion originally intended. Sorry if that seemed long and yo-yo like.

[Whitneyville]

wordslinger, a CD has a 30-38dB wider S/N ratio than the best LP possibly can be. That's about a 1000 times larger difference in volume from the CD than from an LP. When you go to the movies today, the soundtrack is on CD's, just a "control track" on the film to keep them synced. A CD can reproduce accurately the volume and sound of a .357 magnum revolver at 3 feet. I have so many 78's that are on labels that no longer exist (like Edison and Victrola Corp.), I'm "archiving" them. They are shellac and getting more brittle everyday, and someday, I'll pull one out of it's jacket and it will either be cracked or worse "whitecapped" where the surface of the record looks like it has little whitecapped waves on it. The Conservitors at the Library of Congress are having MAJOR problems preserving old sound recordings. 90% of their "Edison cylinders" have been lost, just sitting in a cool vault at constant humidity, the thin shellac just crumbled. Just as 95% (at a minimum) of silent movies and newsreels have been lost forever. Only 3 of nearly 300 Buster Crabbe "8 reelers" (60 minutes +) movies still exist in complete form. NONE of his "4 and 6 reelers" (shorts) exist today, and he made about a thousand (in New Jersey!) for the Edison Motion Picture Company.PS: I can't STAND the sound of MP-3 files or I-POD's or the other sound files. They sound to me like a CD ripped 100 times deep. To me they sound brittle and mechanical....just like a 7 transistor AM radio with a 2 1/2" speaker did in 1962 or so. I didn't like them at the time. I built my own crystal radio and with it's high-impeadence headphones, it had hi-fi sound (30-15KHz) then because the AM stations used to put out good signals. I still have it, and I pulled it out the other night and sure enough, 1010Khz XIXI "De Vox De Monterey" was blasting in, but no "Wolfman" Jack playing US Rock-and Roll.

[zandar]

I do it for multiple reasons.

For one, I like to do it.

also, it saves money. I bought records and I like to use them, but I can't sit in the man room all day long and listen.

I have some pretty odd old records that I haven't yet seen converted to digital.

I'm not sure if my rips are better than commercial releases, but a couple come darn close.

There was a time in the eighties when a lot of CDs sounded pretty bad. (I know, some still think they are all bad. I don't mean it that way. I mean anyone who was not tone deaf could tell.) One notable example was Led Zep's Physical Graffiti. The first CD release in the US (which I snapped up the day it came out) had a compressed, shrill sound I couldn't stand. It never saw much use. Eventually I just used my clean original vinyl to make a digital copy and was pretty satisfied with it. I admit I did eventually supplant it with the remastered version, which is much, much better that the first gen CD.

[flavio81]

wordslinger, a CD has a 30-38dB wider S/N ratio than the best LP possibly can be.

You certainly haven't heard about the DBX-encoded LPs.

A CD can reproduce accurately the volume and sound of a .357 magnum revolver at 3 feet.

You can do that with LP and standard magnetic tape too: Just reduce the recording level...

Also, you're ignoring the fact that is very difficult to reproduce more than around 66dB of dynamic range on a listening room, unless you soundproof the entire room.

So much for dynamic range acrobatics.

[pogo]

Even the most obscure 45's I have turn up on modern cd compilations these days. Do you guys really have that obscure a collection?

Flexibility and portability --

Well -- I rip to the media player as a high res wav file, which I archive to a backup server.
I save the tracks as MP3s to the media server and can play them throughout the house (including poolside), creating as many playlists as I want. I can burn them to an mp3 disc for my car (about six lps per disc) or burn the wav to a cd ( for my wife who's car isn't mp3 friendly).
And of course I can still play the vinyl anytime I want. Doesn't seem that complicated to me.

Oh, and I forgot -- most of my collection of 78s aren't in any CD compilations.

[keeponrockin]

Wow. So this is where I'm heading.

I love the idea of Click Repair. I was theorizing it just before reading the post.

When I get my table up, I'm going to start ripping. Of course I'll have to learn how to. And probably buy some stuff.

Still, now that I'm starting to get bit by the vinyl bug, I'm going to buy perfect vinyl.

[Werner]

"Basically music gets 'squashed', in order to fit it into the somewhat modest headroom given by digital compact discs. "

Digital has no headroom (of course it hasn't!), and a huge dynamic range, far in excess of LP or unaided tape.

So that's not the reason.

The reason is to make the recording as loud, relentless, and brash as possible. Some people think that most people prefer this type of sound. It also helps in getting more subjective volume from ultra-low-powered sources like portable players.


"You certainly haven't heard about the DBX-encoded LPs. "

So you want to generalise based on a niche and rare format, which rightfully died quickly and quietly.

Have you ever heard what dbx did for the music?

--


Yes, ClickRepair is utterly brilliant and well worth its price.

[keeponrockin]

I thought DBX was brilliant at the time. I bought into the theory and real world listening seemed to prove it out. I didn't have the bucks.

Now I see them cheap, or maybe I can just afford it today. It doesn't seem to have any respect. I don't understand that unless it's like the flavor of the month and old technology doesn't impress anymore.

[cactuscowboy]

I started doing vinyl to WAV/CD-R conversions about four years ago, so I could listen to favorite LPs in my Jeep. Friends and family began asking me to make transfers of their records and tapes. I developed it into a business, and added video transfers. I now do it full time.

No doubt the majority of music on 78/45/LP/CASSETTE/8-TRACK has never been reissued on CD nor will it ever be. Even when older music is reissued, the record companies often do a lousy job, compress the hell out of it, or use subpar source material. My first exposure to truly bad commercial CDs was a reissue of The Fall's "Live At The Witch Trials" bought about twenty years ago. I owned the USA release on vinyl but bought the CD as it offered different songs as a UK release. I was shocked to discover the CD reissue was a transfer from a BAD SCRATCHED UP vinyl record. Worse yet, this was a legit release from a major record company and certainly not a bootleg.

Besides lack of reissues of commercial recordings, there's a lot of home-made recordings out there. Some on disc from the 40s, 'acetates', and a helluva lot on cassette and reel to reel. Most of these are cherished family memories, e.g. an interview with Grandpa from 1975.

There is a strong demand out there for audio & video transfers, and I've tapped into it. Customers are absolutely thrilled with the results. I can take beat-to-hell-and-back records, clean them thoroughly, play them on high-end equipment, and then clean up the WAV files. The end result is a CD that sounds far better than any playback experience the customer had with their crappy console record player 40-50 years ago.

[satanfriendly]

And I don't rip anything.

I'm happy enough to load normal CD and downloads on to my I-Pod as I I only use it for portability while either at sea or down the gym.

[Whitneyville]

I have a DBX for my TEAC four channel tape deck, but NO WAY will it reproduce a 135dB sound of a .357 revolver at 6 feet. With the BEST BASF fomula tape and the DBX unit on max, at 15 IPS I have a 91dB sonic range. I remeber DBX'ed LP's and the more popular "compressed" LP's with a "expander" box. This was just about to become an RIAA standard when the Denon CD was invented. I have a "Sounds of Power" CD, that has .357 magnums, .44 magnums, 30-06's, the 16" rifles on the Missouri with full power rounds, as well as racing engines, piston engine areo engines (the Allison, the Merlin, the Griffon, and the Napier Sabre) as well as jet engines. As with any of this type of recording, there is a pilot tone at the beginning. My speakers will reproduce the sound of the 16" rifles of the Missouri at full 156dB volume, if I want to damage my hearing, and scare the neighbors. I have about 25 of my late brother-in-law's sound effects LP's. One has a .38 Special revolver at 50 YARDS,86dB. That's a far cry from the dynamic range of a Denon spec CD. I totally agree that many, many CD's are compressed to be louder, just like 45's were before their demise. I prefer to "rip" to audio cassettes to use in my truck, and I archive my 78's mostly to Hi-Fi VHS, after "half-speed mastering" them to 1/4" R-T-R. The shellac 78's are beginning to rapidly deteriorate, even in the Library of Congress' "vaults". The ethanol has been slowly evaporating from the shellac for 60+ years. You take a 110 year-old shellac record, even the 1/4" thick ones and they are more brittle than glass. No one will bother making CD's of Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foy's, and Eddie Cantor, I've only found 5 CD's of his THOUSANDS of recordings. In 1930-32, Eddie Cantor sold more records than the Beatles did in 1965! Now only nuts like me still listen to him. I have, therefore I "rip".

[Werner]

"My speakers will reproduce the sound of the 16" rifles of the Missouri at full 156dB volume,"

Cute trick.

How do you do that? 1000W amplifier with 126dB sensitivity speakers, or a megawatt amp and normal speakers?



Denon CD? Please reread your history books.