Of late my projects have required me to revive some old records, both the vinyl LP and shellac 78 RPM variety. Funny how I thought I was through with all that as each medium died out—open-reel tapes first, then vinyl and cassettes. But there’s an awful lot of stuff out there that hasn’t made it to digital, and some of it is of keen and abiding interest.
Analog audio isn’t really all that tricky to digitize, but you can’t be a spoiled modern technocrat about it all and expect everything to do its thing without some careful prep work on your part. Past audio tech was tactile, physical, subject to the environment. Records are particularly so, being material objects that carry all of their information right in their material. Ergo, they get dirty and scratched, they wear out, and the audio suffers. Quaint though it may seem, transferring a record to digital involves cleaning solutions and soft rags and microfine brushes, unless you don’t mind decades worth of schmutz adding its own sound to your digital copy. It’s the dirt you can’t see that causes most of the trouble.
So a record-cleaning machine is a very good idea if you want to make sure that you have eliminated as much deep-down goo as you can. Expensive vacuum-based gizmos are available, but a basic Spin-Clean works just fine, even though it doesn’t do absolutely everything for you automatically. But once you’ve gone through the rather engaging process of setting up the Spin-Clean and pouring in the water and cleaning fluid, then spinning the record three times each clockwise and counterclockwise, patting off the liquid with an absorbent gauze cloth, then air-drying, you’re ready to play. Well, save one last swipe with a good old Discwasher cleaner, the type with the directional velour brush that pulls up any last particles.
And the stylus can get dirty, too. So out comes the stylus cleaning fluid—essentially a light denatured alcohol solution—and a few gentle puffs of air over the needle for drying, and a quick check with a magnifying glass to make sure that teeny-tiny diamond is as clean as a whistle.
It’s all so old-timey, like hand-cranking a car to get it to start.
Tapes are easier to deal with as a rule, although they need to be rewound several times before playing. It works best to rewind a 7″ open-reel tape onto a 10″ takeup reel and then rewind from the 10″ back to the 7″—the change in hub diameter helps to retension a tape that has been sitting around for decades. So far I haven’t had to deal with any tapes that have gotten so out of whack as to require baking at low heat for a while, but that can be necessary with acetate tapes that have started to lose the glue that holds the magnetic particles to the tape surface. Otherwise, your first attempt to play the tape will be your last, since the tape head will act like a spatula and scrape those magnetic particles right off. Baking the tape revitalizes the glue.
Tape machines require having their heads and rollers cleaned and aligned. Cassettes don’t need quite as much bother, but head-cleaning and maybe even an occasional de-magnetizing is a must.
Of 78s, LPs, open-reel tapes, and cassettes, only the open-reel tapes pose a challenge of finding a suitable machine for playback. Open-reel tape players have gone nearly extinct, save posh high-end models that have been reconditioned for a minuscule sliver of the audiophile community. (I got mine from a recording studio that was retiring its analog tape equipment.) The last fifteen years have seen a surge of interest in vinyl LPs, with the result that very good turntables, tonearms, cartridges, and accessories are available at a wide range of price points. You can even get cartridges that take styli specifically designed for 78 discs, and that’s an absolute must, since the tiny stylus designed for LPs will drop right to the bottom of a 78 disc’s grooves and miss most of the audio while faithfully reproducing every particle of deeply embedded grit. 78s also need more tracking force (i.e., weight) for optimal sound.
Getting the audio into digital form is essentially a matter of playing it—record, cassette, open-reel tape—and then turning that analog audio into a digital stream that can be stored by a computer. Although just about any computer can digitize analog audio, the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in a computer tends to be rudimentary, and so an outboard model or a specialized internal soundcard is a good idea. I use an Apogee Duet myself, connected to my Mac Pro via Firewire.
A phonostage amplifier is needed for playing a turntable. Many home amplifiers have one built in—if your amp has a “Phono” selector, then you have one—but using a home amp means plugging the turntable into the amp, and then running the amp’s output (such as “Rec Out”) into the analog-to-digital converter. That’s OK, but you’re going through an awful lot of circuitry, and audio quality may suffer. A separate phonostage is optimal. You can buy very nice ones that don’t cost an arm and a leg, by which I mean $200 or so. You can also buy ones that run into four figures and above. Your choice. Your budget. I use an NAD P-2i and I couldn’t be happier.
You can also buy a turntable that offers a high-gain output, meaning that it contains its own phonostage amplifier. But the amp is likely to be low-rent.
Nowadays vendors also sell turntables with a USB output, meaning you just plug it into your computer and you’re ready to go. Those are incredibly convenient, but for them to work, the turntable must contain its own phonostage amplifier and its own analog-to-digital converter. If that’s all part of a $150 package, then you can be sure that both the phonostage amp and ADC are el-cheapos.
Therefore: Turntable/cartridge to phonostage amplifier to ADC to computer. Everything kept separate, allowing for control over every stage of the process.
Cassette and open-reel tape decks don’t need separate amplification; they can plug right into the ADC.
Once you have the source material and your audio hardware, you’re ready to roll. Software now comes into play, not only to store the data, but to edit it. You might need to trim off dead space at the beginning and end, split out an LP side into multiple tracks, or join together the many sides of a 78 RPM set. You might also need to do some processing, such as providing a bit of equalizing to make up for a dead treble or boomy bass. And you might need to deal with noise; records in particular suffer from snap, crackle, and pop.
There’s a balancing act involved in all of that. Overdo the noise suppression and a lifeless, albeit noise-free, recording will result. I’ll take some vinyl crackle or tape hiss over losing audible music any day.
I have a routine worked out. Before Adobe Audition came out for the Macintosh, I used Amadeus Pro to capture and edit the data. But I really like Audition, so I use it for everything except in a few special cases.
If a recording has a high amount of noise, I prefer iZotope over Audition for click/crackle removal and noise suppression. And if I need to make any significant speed adjustments—that can be a problem with 78 RPM discs in particular—I use Soundshifter, a plug-in that works with Cubase and Pro Tools. Soundshifter can even take care of inconsistent speed problems, although the process is fussy. But for everyday projects I stay in Audition.
For those on a tight budget, there’s the free, open-source Audacity. But higher-end commercial stuff offers a level of sophistication that you just can’t get in freeware.
Just this morning I digitized Pierre Monteux’s 1960 LP of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, from RCA Victrola VICS-1457. Monteux was guest-conducting the SFS in this late stereo album that was his last with the orchestra that he had led from 1935 to 1952. Although flip side Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration has been remastered and released on CD, the Wagner never made it past a few vinyl releases—just this one and another Victrola album that paired it with Monteux’s Beethoven 4 with the London Symphony. So unless Sony Music blesses us with a digital remaster, you get it from vinyl or you don’t get it. Fortunately I acquired a copy in near-new condition.
It’s a fascinating performance, vintage Monteux, also vintage 1950s SFS with Merrill Remington’s piquantly nasal oboe. I got an dandy dub from the LP. Compared to ripping a CD into my iTunes library, making that dub is like climbing Everest, but the process is kind of fun. I cleaned the LP with the Spin-Clean, dried it, and gave it a slow swipe with the Discwasher. I cleaned the stylus on the Ortofon cartridge in my Thorens turntable. Then I captured the LP in Adobe Audition and performed a few very light edits, just trimming off dead space at beginning and end, adding a 3 dB boost overall and a 1 dB nudge in the 100 Hz range (my cartridge is just a tad thin in that range), then applying light click/crackle removal, and finally a light noise reduction to eliminate a noticeable hum in the original recording itself. Save the WAV file (24-bit at 48K sampling rate) and make a copy in Apple Lossless format, and that’s what I play using iTunes/Amarra.
Now I’ll never have to clean it before playing or worry about it warping or wearing out. It’s captured digitally. But I’m not sure if that means forever. One wonders: that LP just might wind up being a better long-term storage for the record than my digital version. It persisted for 51 years without becoming unplayable; can I say that of digital files?