In Depth Analogue audio
Archiving
analogue audio
part 1
Ben Hardwidge explains how to rescue your old vinyl and cassette recordings
and preserve them forever in digital form
W
hile cassettes, videos and
DCC tapes have now joined
penny whistles and space
hoppers in the museum of outdated
technology, the vinyl LP has miraculously
survived since the 1930s, with plenty of
new albums still being released on the
archaic format.
Many of us have a dog-eared
collection of records, all organised in
alphabetical order, and we’ll be damned
if we’re going to pay extra to replace
them with low bit-rate downloads
packed with DRM. But if most of
your music is on vinyl, or you’ve got
recordings on good old cassettes, you’re
going to miss out on all the fun of
random play and portable music players.
Unless, that is, you start digitising it.
This month, we’re going to explain
how to unlock your vinyl and cassette
recordings by getting them onto your PC
in digital form. Then next month, we’ll
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look at techniques to clean up and
restore the audio, all using free software.
Getting started
The first factor to take into account before
starting the process is that a record player
outputs a very different signal to the
standard line outputs used by cassette
decks and CD players. The output signal
has a much lower voltage than the
standard line-out of more modern audio
devices, and this needs to be boosted to
line level before recording can take place.
Some people get round this by
plugging the record player’s phono output
into a microphone input socket, since
microphones also have a very low output
level. But do this and you’ll end up with
a tinny and trebly recording that sounds
like the music you get down the phone
while on hold to customer services.
This is because a record player pre-
amp – which brings the raw output of
a record player up to line level – does
more than just boost the signal; it also
adjusts the equalisation, boosting bass
and cutting the treble. An audio
waveform is physically encoded in
the grooves of an LP, and strong
bass frequencies, if left as they are,
would need a very wide groove,
limiting the playing time per side of
a disc. The way round this is to attenuate
the bass frequencies before they’re
cut to disc, and then boost them again
on playback.
RIAA compensation
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association
of America) introduced the standard
RIAA frequency-response curve for pre-
amps in 1954 and it’s still used today.
Yes, the RIAA actually did something
useful before it decided to wage war on
nine-year-old girls downloading MP3s.
The RIAA curve is pretty
straightforward: bass frequencies of
20Hz get a 20dB boost after going
through the pre-amp, and this declines
The Ion
iTTUSB Turntable
pretty evenly up to 1kHz, which isn’t
is a tempting boosted at all. Signals above 1kHz are
choice to keep life trimmed back in the same fashion, up to
simple, but your
records won’t frequencies of 20kHz, which get a 20dB
sound great. reduction. This reintroduces the correct
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20
10
0dB
-10
-20
20Hz 1000Hz 20KHz
The RIAA frequency-response curve is the
standard way of equalising an LP’s signal.
bass and treble frequencies: the treble
is boosted before mastering, which
means high-frequency noise and pops
from the surface of the record can then
be attenuated on playback.
Digitising audio
There are several ways of recording vinyl
to your PC via a pre-amp, and the one you
choose will depend on how much money
and time you have, as well as how much
of a stickler you are for audio quality. At
the bottom end of the scale is a USB
record player like the Ion iTTUSB Turntable
(web ID: 122259). On the plus side, it has
a built-in pre-amp, it’s easy to set up and
it’s quick. On the downside, recordings
are plagued with rumble from the
turntable motor, and the sound is tinny
and lacking in detail. Plus, it’s expensive:
£100 from www.johnlewis.com
Another method is to use a turntable-
specific pre-amp, which can come via
a USB device or even a sound card.
However, it’s worth reading the small
print on these devices, as they can
sometimes have issues with recording.
Terratec’s acclaimed DMX 6Fire sound
card, for instance, had a built-in RIAA
pre-amp, but you couldn’t actually
capture audio with it enabled, making it
nothing more than a way of playing
records through your PC speakers.
One of the best ways of recording vinyl
is to use a portable Sony Hi-MD MiniDisc
recorder, which may be a surprise given
Sony’s penchant for weird proprietary
audio formats and DRM. The advantage is
that you don’t need to drag your record
player from the lounge to your PC; you just
plug the MiniDisc recorder into the tape
output of your hi-fi amp. Another bonus is
that MiniDisc recorders come equipped
with a Track Mark button, which you just
press when you’re at the end of the track,
creating a new file for the next one in
real- time. A Hi-MD recorder will also
let you record in DRM-free PCM
uncompressed audio at 16-bit/44.1kHz
(the same resolution as CD), and you can
then transfer it to your PC and convert it
into a WAV file for archiving.
The downer with this method is
that you have to fork out for a MiniDisc
recorder, and they’re not that easy to
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find these days. That said, you can pick
them up on Ebay, and a cheap MZ-NH
600 model will do the job fine for around
£40 to £50, as long as you get a power
supply for it (recording with MiniDisc will
eat the batteries).
Finally, we come to the cheapest and
favourite method of recording, which is
to hook up your PC’s sound card to
the tape recorder output of your hi-fi
amplifier, use your amp’s built-in RIAA
pre-amp and record the audio on your PC
using a free audio-editing application
such as Audacity (http://audacity.
sourceforge.net). This method lets you
use your existing dedicated turntable,
you get complete control over the audio
and, most importantly, it’s free. To record
cassette tapes, you can simply bypass
the hi-fi amp altogether, and connect the
output from your tape deck straight into
the line-in on your sound card. This is the
method we’ll concentrate on for the
remainder of this In Depth.
Connections
Connecting your PC
to your hi-fi amp is
easy: find the tape
recorder output on
the amp and plug it
into the line-in socket on your
sound card with a 3.5mm mini-jack-to-
stereo-phono cable. Not all modern hi-fi
amps have a phono input with RIAA pre-
amp to connect a turntable, but there are
some great affordable hi-fi pre-amps out
there that will do the job. Cambridge
Audio’s excellent 540P pre-amp, for
example, will fit perfectly in your hi-fi
setup, and it only costs £40 inc VAT from
Richer Sounds (www.richersounds.co.uk).
Audio puritans will tell you vinyl
produces a perfect analogue audio
wave, and a CD can’t because it can only
reproduce samples at 44.1kHz, so you’re
best recording at 24-bit/96kHz using
a high-end sound card. They’re right to
a certain extent, but there’s no point in
going overboard. We recommend using
a half-decent sound card with good
digital-to-analogue converters, such as
a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music. The
X-Fi can’t sample natively at 44.1kHz,
but Creative has massively improved its
sample rate conversion in recent times.
The X-Fi’s 24-bit Crystallizer can also
make vinyl recordings sound fuller and
more dynamic when it’s enabled on
playback – just set it to around 15%.
If you don’t want to shell out for
a card like that, don’t despair: the audio
chipsets integrated into most PCs these
days are more than capable of capturing
decent-quality audio.
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Recording using Audacity
Now that you have your PC hooked up to
the pre-amp on your hi-fi amp, it’s time
to start recording. Your first job is to
download Audacity (from http://
audacity.sourceforge.net/download),
and we recommend downloading the
latest beta (1.3.4 at the moment), as
Audacity introduced an excellent noise-
reduction filter in version 1.3.3. By
comparison, the noise-removal utility in
the current “stable” version (1.2.6) has
a tendency to make your recordings sound
like they were recorded underwater.
You now need to set up Audacity for
Creative’s
recording, and we recommend sampling
affordable Sound straight at 16-bit/44.1kHz. Again,
Blaster X-Fi will audiophiles reckon it’s better to sample at
do a great job
of recording 32-bit/44.1kHz, as you can always
your vinyl. convert it later, and 32-bit samples are
more precise. But a 32-bit sample will
require a great deal more
number crunching
and take up more
hard disk space,
and you’d really be
hard-pushed to tell the
difference in sound quality.
It’s also good to sample
straight to 16-bit/44.1kHz from
a convenience perspective: one of the
best ways of backing up your vinyl is to
burn it straight to CD audio, giving you
a rippable CD that will make life much
easier should your hard disk fail and you
need to transfer your music again. This
way, you just need to rip a CD, rather
than recording the LP again.
Once Audacity’s all set up, you can
begin recording (see walkthrough
overleaf). Start by giving your record
a good clean (or the heads of your tape
deck if you’re transferring from cassette),
then record the whole thing from start to
finish. After that, you’ll need to break
the resulting sound file into individual
tracks, cutting out the hiss and crackle at
For the best the beginning and end of the track. You
sound quality, use can also use Audacity to remove pops,
the Noise Removal
tool in the latest crackling and hiss during the songs, and
beta of Audacity. we’ll reveal how to do that next month.
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 In Depth Analogue audio

Walkthrough Recording with Audacity

1 2
Download the latest beta version of Audacity from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Go to Preferences in the Edit menu, select your sound card as the recording and
download. Version 1.3.4 has a vastly superior noise-reduction tool to the one in the playback device, and ensure Channels is set to 2 (stereo). You need to lengthen the
current stable version, 1.2.6. After that, simply install Audacity. Effects Preview to 20 seconds for future editing and disable the Playthrough options.

3 4
Select Quality in the left-hand pane and 44100Hz for the Default Sample Rate, and Select dB from the pull-down menu next to the microphone, then press the Pause
16-bit for the Default Sample Format. Now click OK to save these settings, exit from button, followed by the Record button and start your record playing. You don’t want the
the Preferences box, then set the recording source to Line-In in the pull-down menu. peaks on the level meter any higher than 0dB, as this is when the sound gets clipped.

5 6
Play the loudest parts of a few tracks to get an idea of the levels, and adjust the When your record has finished playing, press the Stop button in Audacity, and then
recording level by sliding the bar next to the microphone picture on the left. When select Fit to Window in the View menu. The end result should look something like this.
satisfied, press the Pause button and record your whole record from start to finish. We’ve only recorded one side of a record, but you can clearly see five tracks.

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 7 8
Save your work as an Audacity Project file, then drag a grey box over the first track to You now have a clear view of just your first track, so clear out the crackle at the start
select it. It doesn’t matter if you overlap the second track, so long as all of the first track and finish. Drag a grey box over the beginning of the track up until the point where you
is selected. Now press <Ctrl-C>, select New from the File menu and press <Ctrl-V>. can clearly see the song has started, then select Zoom to Selection in the View menu.

9 10
In this close-up view, you can see the blip where the stylus first hit the record, as well Select Fit in Window from the Zoom menu to make the whole track visible again. Now
as the beginning crackles and where the song begins. To delete everything before the we want to remove unwanted noise from the end of the track, so drag a grey box over
actual track begins, drag a box over it and hit Del. the end portion of the track and select Zoom to Selection from the View menu again.

11 12
If your track has a clean ending, just delete the crackle after it. However, if it fades out, Save your track by selecting Export from the File menu, then WAV (16-bit Microsoft
draw a grey box over the ending and press Play to hear it and see at which point the song PCM) after clicking Options. Repeat this process with the other tracks. If any run into
ends and you can only hear crackling. You can then delete anything after that point. each other, copy and paste them into two separate files without deleting anything.

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