OT Vinyl to MP3

Well ... I don't know what your listening habits are, but what I overhear from many people's listening suggests that things like signal-to-noise ratio are pretty irrelevant. Having said that, if you want faithful reproduction, you will want to sample the sound with a sampler, and not with one of the <$100k sound board circuits that is in every PC these days. You can get pretty decent sampling from any of a number of circuits sold by various vendors these days, notably Crystal Semiconductor, (Maybe Clint Wolff can help clear this up.), some of which can sample at stereo rates with 20-24 bit samples. If you build a circuit around these chips but put it in an environment that's "clean" in the sense that all the digital switching noise normally found in a PC isn't there, not on the PSU and not on the ground lines, and not on the signal lines in any other sense, you have an opportunity to reclaim what you can get from the medium you're wanting to transcribe. I spent a lot of time with this back in '95 or so, at which time I was trying to transcribe my jazz vinyls and some of my reel-to-reel tapes of live performances, done with just 2 microphones. I found, first of all, that, for most recordings, even the sound card approach was quite adequate. Secondly, I found that software, and particularly sampleware, was pretty ineffective, regardless of what it claimed, for removing the annoying shot noise that vinyls often have, due to static or dust. I also found that most of the software I was able to try made sound quality worse rather than better when it was turned loose on my transcribed tunes. I've never had any interest in MP3, but ISTM that people willing to listen to what most of them listen to nowadays get what they deserve when they use MP3, and if it's to their liking, or more for their convenience, and since they can tolerate the 3db signal to noise ratio of a live performance, they certainly won't mind the slight distortion that MP3 introduces. For those of us who want high-fidelity, well, we have to build our own stuff, because it won't work very well inside a computer regardless how much it costs. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chad Fernandez" &lt;fernande(a)internet1.net&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 10:04 PM Subject: Re: OT Vinyl to MP3