Vinyl rips

[Herzeg Dva]

It seems many rippers don't care that their records having a crazy ratio of cracks and pops.. which is a shame since many singles were only released on said format (especially disco hits). I thought vinyl owners took greater care of their records?

[Halibut]

Vinyl isn't as easy to protect from damage as newer music media forms are.  Plus vinyl is getting historic, so it's only right that it's been ageing.

[MheAd]

Well, all vinyl rips that I've heard (even 20 yr old records) sound great.
Sometimes, a thiny addition of pop/click removal in your favorite editing app can do miracles. But you probably have faced some bad rips from bad people, with zero knowledge in ripping (and preserving).

Also..."vinyl rip" is so....wrong as a term. Vinyl transfer is more accurate in my book.
Same goes to "tv and vhs rip".
You don't rip analog stuff...sounds just stupid.

[Herzeg Dva]

Oh yes, that's a technically better term and I read your im message this morning.. sorry my php skillz are not l33t in fact I haven't touched it in half a century.. ever I mean "decade" 

[Anomonous Guy]

The thing with Vinyl is that it is transferred, as Mhead says, from analog to digital. If you do that, you're bound to get some flaws along the line.

Most music lovers who want these vinyl copies like to have those flaws anyway...

[MheAd]

Yeah, but also in the end - it's all about the quality / preservation of the vinyl recording and the way it was transfered. For instance - I've got a vinyl>cd-r transfer of the Clash "London Calling" from this collector I know, the original US pressing from 1979 and it sounds fucking incredible - better than these late 90s digital CD remasters!!! I don't even hear any flaws. So how did guy make it? Well, most of the serious vinyl collectors never really play their albums more than few times. They usually archive their albums to cassette tapes during the initial playback of the recording and then play it from the tape instead. Album/recording itself is used only for looking at pictures, reading lyrics and stuff like that while the vinyl is rarely ever played again. That's how this '79 vinyl managed to remain preserved and more-less intact for all these years. Then of course, during the transfer itself it's an imperative to have some good gear - especially the quality of the turntable is crucial! The pickup must be high-end and there are many fancy turntables with these speed-control thingies that prevent the record having variable speed (faster / slower - depending on the position of the track/pickup on the area of the record) - but always equal and 100% accurate. It's funny that most of normal turntables back in the day didn't have this feature but it got applied to new models, many years after vinyl as standard media format was gone.  The analog recording should always be captured in 24-bits WAV - to the computers sound card (preferably a good brand, but even integrated cards showed results that were satisfactory)  via a good (pre)Amp connected between the turntable and line-in on your computer. The common practice is to do a flat transfer, with equalizer on your amp turned off. Some light, very light, pop/click removal can be applied through the sound-editing application but it's usually not necessary. And yeah, after the recording the sound should be always normalized to 100% but on the wave-file as whole, before the it's split to tracks. If you do it on individual tracks you'll destroy the original volume level balance between tracks. From there you can keep the wave file (or convert to 24-bit FLAC) and play it on your computer, or burn it as 24-bit PCM DVD-Audio (don't mix it up with the usual dvd-sound like Dolby Digital / DTS and shit - DVD-A is something entirely else - google for it) or you can downsample it to 16-bit FLAC/WAV and/or burn as CD. But it's always an imperative to transfer vinyls in the best quality possible. And there are few more tricks that I won't go into -  but if you follow the description above - you'll get a hell of a vinyl transfer that will get the faggy mp3/digital generation become green in their faces! Of course, I understand the irony of me spitting on the digital age while actually using some digital stuff to get the result of the above!  

[TVPR]

tl;dr

[Herzeg Dva]

I have a good quality turntable but it's an ancient model without any advanced features. Besides all the albums I have are already released to CD. Wish I knew a quality source for vinyl transfers of the more rare albums.

And why does French disco induce sleep? :/

[TVPR]

Why the fuck would anyone even want to listen to french disco?

[MheAd]

TVPR had a bad weekend.

[MheAd]

Besides all the albums I have are already released to CD.

You are a very excentric lad, with a lot of ideas how certain things work. And you never read what I write, on MSN, on forums (when you are asking for help) - you indeed, just like Anom once said, tend to fall asleep in middle of a discussion that you originally started.

The main reason of people transfering vinyls to cd-r is not because an album in particular isn't released on CD (well, of course, that could be, logically, a reason too).

The main reason is the other way around - because the actual CD version, especially more recent remasters - usually sounds like shit - too loud, compressed - giving you a very stressful experience.

What sounds good originally, should never be remastered!

Many new CD-pressings ruined the sound of a lot of classic albums. The solution = get an old CD pressing before "loudness war" started (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) , or,  if you are a real audiophile,  get a good vinyl transfer.

Other reasons for vinyl transfers - vinyls have have a very different mastering either way (even when there is a good CD-version avaiable) and some people prefer it, some are curious to hear it, etc...

[Anomonous Guy]

Phake, I think Mhead is trying to say that people have different tastes.

Most music buffs and fanatics I know of speak about music recording/digital transfer the way Mhead has above... For some people it is a passion to have it sounding the way it was originally intended on vinyl, for others they prefer a perfect digital copy, others like to hear the flaws and clicks and pops of the music as it was made using analogue effects, rather than 'perfect' digital ones.

[Herzeg Dva]

But can't you see my chief complaint? Audiophiles don't often distribute their vinyl transfers therefore we end up getting CDs because they're more prevalent, and the certainly don't work for music publishers either. An audiophile can be a whole lot different to a sound engineer who wants to get the job done and receive his or her paycheck. Audiophilia isn't common among the file sharing community or music providers either. The same can be said of the videophilia phenomenon, Most people are content with SD DVD (as they were with VHS vs Beta) and while Bluray is sustaining itself it's pretty much a given video quality will always come second to its affordability. In fact video transfers do suffer often as well. But you can never find enough passion in most paid jobs, and engineering is much of an art as it is technology.

[Anomonous Guy]

Your first post ties vinyl collectors and rippers in the same category. Your most recent one says that they're completely seperate entities. What are you actually asking here?

[Herzeg Dva]

Yes precisely. Why don't more vinyl collectors share their collections with the world?