Building a PC for digitizing vinyl

[Inscrutable]

I am toying with the idea of digitizing a sizable portion of my vinyl collection - thinking the lesser recordings or physical condition discs, and keeping the higher quality one available for TT playback. I've got over 3000 LP's and am out of rack space, and realistically they aren't accessible enough to get to listen to enough of them. Thinking if they were accessible whole house, auto, and iphone I'd get more enjoyment from them.

I am just starting to wrestle with how and where I want to do the RIAA EQ and how I want to record and if/how I want to clean up. Not to mention if/how I live long enough to do it.

Didn't know/recall if any of you have plowed this ground, or if any have interest in plowing along with me, or if I should take this to another venue?

[richidoo]

Plow on young man.

In the past I used a manual editing method with SoundForge3, which is an excellent tool (now called Sony Vegas, it's overkill.) But now there are tools made just for vinyl ripping that sense silence, remove noise, separate tracks, etc automatically. Like
http://www.magix.com/us/audio-cleaning-lab/ $60

As for building a PC, I guess you should if you don't have one to use. But it's not necessary if you have any old shitbox that you can repurpose. As an audiophile you will want to do minimal processing to the files. Editing and normalizing are not processor intensive. I used a 2Ghz P4 with good results.

Get a nice sound card, that's what really matters. I would recommend Presonus AudioBox22vsl for class A inputs via USB, $200 plus some RCA adapters. The microphone input might be hot enough for phono direct input, then you could compare a RIAA plugin filter to your real phono preamp.

It does take a long time. You might check out streaming services which probably have most of your records, but compressed. Booooo wet blanket booooooooo

[Inscrutable]

Thanks Rich. Audiobox looks interesting, hadn't seen it before.  Part of my deliberation is what to do going forward with digital music files - whether to keep going with SB, switch to something like Sonos, or build this PC to also be the audio source. Wonder if building this with a good soundcard - like a Lynx - is killing 2 birds with one stone, or still either not that much better, or getting into more complexity or be more glitchy/tweaky than I care to deal with.

I do have a pretty nice surplus PC ... it was the HTPC I made when I was running the CRT. Oversized 120mm fan, grommeted/cusioned drive mountings, fanless graphics card, etc.  Hard drive or O/S has crashed or otherwise frozen so need to deal with that, and the fan controller only seemed to run full speed so I need to live with that or get a new MOBO I guess. Otherwise very quiet and capable enough.

[etcarroll]

Rich is right about the harware, I repurposed my old htpc with a decent soundcard and P4 3.0 cpu and 2 gig ram to ripping vinyl by loading Audacity, freeware.

[richidoo]

I know what you mean. PC is flexible, but noise and cost need to be considered. IMO, PC is most valuable if you need processing power for FIR filters, music production, ripping, etc. In a traditional passive filter system, I think it's tough to beat Sonos with a good DAC for value and simplicity. I don't think Lynx is in same SQ category as some of the latest generation DACs, but it beats a stock hardware player's analog out. The Presonus is much better input SQ than the Lynx, while Lynx2 might be better output with it's jitter reducing features.

[Inscrutable]

Yeah, if I can't get SB under control, and it sounds like better than I have tried and failed,I am thinking Sonos/DAC for digital. My old HTPC will work fine for the temporary (though it will seem pemranent) vinyl conversion process.

I am still going to keep a more select group of LP's around, and continue to collect, so I think I will go ahead with a good phono stage and not worry about RIAA digitally.

[mgalusha]

I suggest that whatever you use to digitize them with, use the highest available resolution for the recording. You can always made a lower resolution copy if the SB or whatever won't play the high resolution version and that way the job is already done should you get a high resolution DAC in the future.

One thing to consider is the Korg MR-2000S. This is a DSD recorder and I have heard the results of vinyl converted with this and then down converted from DSD to standard CD via Korg's Audio Gate software and it was much closer to the vinyl than I expected. The downside is you would need a standard RIAA preamp but the resulting recording should be superb and now that DSD capable DAC's are appearing on the market you could play the DSD files without ever doing any sort of conversion.

Just a thought.

[Inscrutable]

I like a lot about the Korg .. except the price.
I understand that there will be a LOT of time involved, and so it makes sense to do it at as high a quality as possible/practical. That said, my current thinking is to digitize a lot of the bell curve of my collection - not great stuff and not crappy. Not sure this investment is worth it for that. I do plan to get a decent phono stage at least, and feed to the line inputs of a decent sound card.  Can't find any sound card with a mic input that has a reasonable range or value of impedance and sensitivity to go straight from the table.

Now if there are a group of digitizer wanna-be's that would like to split the cost of the Korg and send it on tour... 
Of course, that tour could rival any of the geriatric tours in extant now.