Ripping Vinyl Part 1 – Hardware

Posted on Apr 20, 2010 | 11 comments

Cosmic Boogie isn’t always about dubby percussion, having disco drinks in the park, or me spouting bollocks. No sir, one of the things that still brings many people to the site are the tutorials I wrote a while ago about how to use Serato and so on. I need to update these, as all my methods have changed now (I am 100% committed to my Macbook and iTunes these days), but that’s for another article. This one concentrates on something I found mixed information on everywhere I looked, but nothing that cohesive; ripping vinyl.

When I say ripping vinyl, I don’t mean ripping it down to 128 mp3′s for sharing on blogs, something that is personally not for me (only an opinion – each to their own). I mean ripping my collection so I can use it with Serato, or any other digital solution I choose to adopt in the future. Because, lets be honest, its kind of all going that way.

Background Research

When I started to look into this I didn’t realise how many options I would come across for ripping the correct way, or someone else’s correct way, or someone else’s correct way, or…well you get the idea. Everyone has a take on this, so I am going to lay down some caveats for my methods so you can understand what I am trying to achieve writing this and make sure it sounds useful before you have to dive in (it’s quite a lengthy article after all).

1. This article is written in such a manor that it is more about the reasoning why I chose to rip vinyl a certain way, with background info and alternatives suggested. Its not a step by step how to.
2. I am not an audiophile. I mean, I like my sound to be as good as I can with the budget I have, and try to make sure the basic things are right, but this article tries to look at things from the angle of someone who cannot spend £800 on a power supply.
3. To back that up, I am operating here on a strict budget, only buying things within budget that will really help the process. I cannot afford to spend £500 on new equipment, and I think that many other people would be in that position.
4. I struggle to fully explain technical terms. I am not a sound engineer. I know what compression means because I bought a book that explains it to me (written by a sound engineer), but that’s about it.
5. I took a lot of help from people on the wonderful DJ History Forum (in particular the ninja that is Darryl Funk and the super digital convert Captain Cookson), and other such places. You could do worse than look there to accompany this. I will add some “further reading” at the end.
6. This article is by no means the be all and end all – that is, even though I have learned a lot I don’t know everything. Anyone who disagrees or has something to add please do so in the comments at the bottom. I am  just as much a novice as some of you reading this might be, and nowhere near an expert as others will be.
7. Please don’t use this to have a debate about whether or not vinyl is better than digital. The answer is it probably is, but great music is great on all formats.

With all that in mind, and if your still with me, Ive split what I learned into three stages; preparing your vinyl, getting the right equipment and recording to digital.

Preparing Your Vinyl

Old records get dusty. In fact, new records get dusty too, but not like old records. Even if you have all your records stored immaculately in plastic sleeves in dry places, if they have been sat for years unused, they will be dusty. Old records also get scratched, worn, used, damaged and generally soiled more than new records simply because they have been around for longer. Dusty records sound terrible when recorded to digital, and although you can do your cleaning at the stage when its in the computer – do you really want to, when you could do it before hand and take away the need for often over zealous click / scratch removal software?

Before you rip your vinyl it needs cleaning. Maybe if its brand new from Juno / Piccadilly that morning you would be OK, but in general, it needs cleaning. There are of course many solutions to do this, ranging from soapy water in a kitchen bowl, to wonderfully expensive robotic cleaning systems. If you can afford it, for sure, buy one of the robots. If you cannot, there are a few things that I have purchased that made a real difference for me.

• Vinyl Cleaning Fluid – this one to be exact. Cheap, and good. Two little sprays and a good wipe is a good start.
• Ant Static cloths – for wiping the vinyl. Be careful which ones you buy because they sometimes leave fluff on the record, which I am sure defeats the object. Choose carefully, and they make a big difference.
• Static removing gun. I managed to get one of these quite cheap from eBay, and i was a little skeptical at first. However when I was cleaning my records it was really evident just how much static was on them, and static discharges through the needle – so it was really a no-brainer. Its made a big difference (just use it on the record before you are about to rip it).

That’s it. That’s how I clean my records, with a combination of the above. I guess, really, it doesn’t matter how you clean them as long as you follow one of the more tried and tested methods. Someone will undoubtedly tell me that using the vinyl cleaning fluid is bad for your records, and so on. I’m going off what I know, and all the above cost me about £40 altogether, which is palatable. I am thinking about getting one of these for some of my older records, they really clean into the groove well (read that review and you will see), but its an (admittedly small) expense (at around £30 on ebay) that I don’t need at the moment.

I’m not saying that all your records will come up scratch or crackle free if you give them a good clean, that’s really not going to happen. At least you have done your bit though to get rid of either years of neglect or overplay. Its probably an obvious step really, anyone who tries to rip dusty arse old records without even trying to do something about it probably deserves what they get. Once your records are nice and clean its probably a good idea to get some plastic sleeves over them, make sure they have an inner sleeve also – and generally try to keep them in as good a condition as possible. Sounds obvious doesn’t it, but I know loads of people who never follow any of these steps.

Getting The Right Equipment

I agonised over this for weeks. Months, if I am being honest. My poor girlfriend often had to be on the receiving end of what I had decided to buy and how I had decided to do things, just so I could hear my decisions out loud and make sure they made sense. Even then I wasn’t sure, and unlike many other facets of my life, she couldn’t help me. You see, I am a little bit obsessive compulsive (it runs in the family) and I start to freeze up a bit if I think I could be doing something better. (This, incidentally, is one of the reasons I am dreading comments from people who read this who know nu-fangled solutions I didn’t discover). In the end, I had to decide and get on with it, trying not to worry that if I spent another £1000 then I could get that little bit more from the rip – I wanted good solid quality with pretty much the equipment I already had, and a small budget for improving or upgrading.

The key to getting the best quality recording is taking as many links out of the chain between your record decks and your PC as possible. Everything that you have between the vinyl and the final digital output can colour the sound in some way. Mixer, Amp, Cables, Digital Audio Interface – everything. You need to minimise the links, and if you do have to use equipment, use the best that you can. Same with cables, needles, and so on. Using the best that you can, however, does not mean that everything you have at the moment needs to be chucked out and new equipment purchased at huge expense, as you will see.

There are three different methods I looked at:

Ripping with a dedicated turntable that has digital out

For me, you can forget this method. I don’t really even want to waste that much space saying why – all you need to know is that they sell these record decks in the ever awesome electrical goods isle at Asda. That might sound snobbish – I don’t mean it to, what I am saying is that these are made for the mass market. If you just want to rip your old collection for your shitty pc speakers and play it through iTunes then these will do the job. They are not made for serious ripping (and subsequent playing), and should be avoided. Your DJ Turntable has a better needle, tonearm, everything. One of the decks I looked at only converted to MP3 onto a flash card with its own in built software. That’s some scary shit. If you want to see an entire list of what NOT to buy for ripping vinyl, why not browse the entire stock at Maplins.

As a side note, there are USB turntables that you can get from Numark and Stanton – although they are a good few hundred quid, maybe if anyone has used these and had any experience they could post up about it in comments…I am not even sure that these are something that you could successfully rip with (I assume they do analogue to digital conversion down the USB lead – but just don’t know).

Ripping with a Technics turntable through a dedicated phono stage

I learned a lot about sound quality and how mixers work with amps when I was reading up on this. It would shock most of the proper DJ’s to hear this, but I didn’t know what pre-amps or phono stages and such things were. Why should I? Its not something I ever really had to be concerned with. I don’t really use my turntables for listening – i use them as a technical tool. Somethings I do listen to on vinyl but always found the quality from the usual setup to be adequate.

It turns out it is something I really need to be concerned with when looking at ripping vinyl, and correct sound reproduction from vinyl…and everything else to do with vinyl. Its something that passed me by through ignorance rather than design. I am not going to go into the details of how these things work here, because Wikipedia is cleverer than me and can do a better job. However, I am sure if your serious about ripping vinyl then you have come across these terms and may be thinking about this route. There are three different ideas I toyed around with.

The Ripper

The first is this thing – The Ripper. Not only does it have a great name, but it also looks like it does nothing other than RIP YOUR VINYL. Which, of course, is a good thing. No gadgets, no fanciness, no over complifimication – just pure RIPPING ABILITY. It is basically a phono stage of seemingly very good quality that you plug your deck straight into, and it has a USB lead coming out of it that goes straight into the computer. So it does the analogue to digital conversion in the box, and then you use whatever software you want at your end on the computer. You don’t even need an external soundcard to go into – truly an awesome black box for RIPPING and RIPPING ONLY. There are, however, a few draw backs with it. Firstly its around $400 – which at current exchange rate equates to about £270. Not exactly fitting into my “small budget use the equipment you have” mindset is it. You can of course buy a kit version and make your own (for much less expense) but it requires you to have a masters in molecular nuclear physics no doubt, and I am stupid. So no.

The other problem is slightly more technical – as I will explain in the recording to digital section further down, when recording, you really need to to be able to capture at a high sample rate and bit resolution. You may be familiar with the standard resolution for CD’s – 16bit and 44.1khz – 16bit is the resolution depth and the 44.1khz is the sample rate. Just because CD music is at those rates doesn’t mean that’s all you can have with digital, you can record a far greater level. Ill explain more about this later, but The Ripper only rips at the aforementioned 16bit and 44.1khz – so straight away, even through it would sound good, you cannot record any better. That’s a limitation too far (and one I admit I didn’t spot at first). This coupled with the price led me to a sadly negative conclusion about this particular piece of hardware.

Alternatives? Yes, there are plenty. There is another USB cable straight to PC Phono Stage (of sorts) called the USB PhonoPLus V2. It looks a bit tacky compared to the machine that is THE RIPPER, however, I am told by a couple of people that it does a good job. Its about £80 (although hunting on eBay I found it for less) but sadly it has the same limitations musically as THE RIPPER – that is, your pretty much restrained to recording audio at CD quality. Its just not really good enough, so maybe a dedicated phono stage that’s not a digital converter would be better, and let my soundcard handle the analogue to digital conversion by itself?

I looked into this, and it would be great – but once again I found that it would cost me a good amount of money to get a really good pre-amp. The one I finally settled on, if I was going to go down this route, would be the Cambridge Audio 640p. This seemed a reasonable price and I also like Cambridge Audio gear. It might not be top audiophile standard, but its good value and good quality equipment and it has served me well over the years. Looking into what else I would need if I purchased one of these, in order to get the best recording I would need a moving magnetic cartridge (a needle for the deck) and also some really top notch audio leads from the pre amp to my computer. All this is starting to seriously mount up, and if you remember, there is a very limited budget I have on offer here so I am starting to wonder at this point is there any compromise between this method and the equipment I already have?

Ripping with a Technics deck through a mixer

This is almost identical to the method listed above, however, instead of a dedicated pre-amp, it uses the pre-amp that you already have in your DJ Mixer (assuming, of course, that you have a DJ mixer). In this instance, I am lucky that I own an Allen & Heath Xone 32. Some quick research on the web and I found out that the pre-amp installed into this mixer as standard is very good, and that I would be hard pressed to beat it even if I spent decent money…so, with my new found knowledge, I settled on using the pre-amps in the mixer.

The solution entails your Record deck going into your mixer via the phono leads, then some good quality phono cables coming from the “Record Out” of your mixer, and into your computers external (or not-come-as-standard internal) soundcard. Something that many people would already have setup these days because it is probably how many of us record mixes in the first place. The things I needed to do were upgrade the cables between the mixer and the PC – and, I settled on the best Cambridge Audio Azur cables I could get (around £40 each I paid for them), and I also needed to make sure my soundcard could handle the incoming signal and had decent analogue to digital conversion, at the correct 24bit / 192khz format that I wanted. Luckily, mine is ok. I have an Audiophile Firewire (picked up from ebay for about £100), and it can handle everything I need to throw at it.

Rme Fireface 400

Thats not to say if I had money to spend I couldn’t get better – there are a million soundcard’s out there that are better than the on I am using, but again, going back to the budget debate – I have to be practical. Realistically, to get the best possible sound conversion, you are looking at high end cards like the RME FireFace 400 – but this little beauty weighs in at about £650 brand new, or £550 second hand – so clearly, its aimed at a spectrum that is out of my range at the moment. Another good soundcard, and one that I will eventually upgrade to (in the next few months I hope) is the Edirol FA-66 (which I have seen going for around £200 on ebay). Both of these cards have better analogue to digital convertors, and so you will get a better, cleaner sound from your recorded vinyl. I am not exactly sure how much of a difference you would notice as an average user on standard equipment though, but maybe someone else could shed some light on that?

Hardware Setup

So you really dont need me to tell you how to plug a record deck into something with the minimum of fuss, and I am not about to do that. I am going to give you some basic bullet pointed tips for things to make sure you have your hardware setup correctly.

• Make sure whatever needles you have decided to use are tracked correctly and are in as good a condition as possible
• Make sure your Technics deck is grounded properly either with the ground lead attached to the ground on the mixer properly, or the technics ground lead modification fitted (i.e. – no need for a ground lead anymore).
• You want as few steps as possible ftom your deck to your computer – so really, one lead that comes out of the mixer straight into the soundcard. No shitty extension cables joined at the middle, no ground loop isolators getting in the way, nothing. Just one lead from the deck into the mixer, and one lead from the mixer to the soundcard.
• Make sure that any digital djing solution you might use is not connected – as in, dont use the pass through option. No point in “passing through” Serato for ripping, might as well just bypass it altogether.
• Make sure that you are not connected to an amp – you don’t need to be. As were taking the signal straight out of the mixer into the soundcard, we don’t need use the amp at all. If your connected to an amp and the sound is being ripped through that, the sound will be coloured by the amp.
• Make sure no noise enters the room during the recording process – there is no point you hearing what you are recording – all you are in effect doing if you have the sound turned up is increasing the chances of bass / noise feedback into the rip itself.
• Check your equipment for any digital hum – try to figure out if anything is laying any noise or interference down that could potentially upset the track that you are ripping. You can check for this quickly by listening through your speakers with nothing playing – if you hear something, there is a chance it could be recorded. (There is also a way to check for this in software I will mention later).

Conclusion

Just to re-cap…I am going to use the equipment I already have to rip:

1 x Technics 1200 Turntable
1 x Ortofon Nightclub S cartridge (properly tracked and setup)
1 x Allen & Heath Xone32 mixer
1 x Audiophile Firewire soundcard
2 x Cambridge Audio Azur reference phono leads

Sure, with a better soundcard it might be better. Sure, with dedicated pre-amp and moving magnetic cartridge, it might be better – but ultimately, it would also be significantly more expensive, and I do not have that kind of money to invest at the moment. Its something I will upgrade over time. The only thing I really need to do now, is make sure I have everything I have decided on setup to the absolute optimum it can be. That doesn’t cost money, just the time and care to get it right.

Part 2 of this very wordy article will cover the software side of things – what to use, correct settings, cleaning up recordings, storage, tagging…the works. It might take me a few weeks to write it, but when its done, I will link back to it here…