Get Rid of the Vinyl?

[Hyperborea]

It appears that we have a few audiophiles here so I'm going to ask about vinyl - not the kind that you wear.  

I'm trying to decide whether to get rid of the old albums (400+) or to get a new turntable.  If I get rid of the albums I would hope to pull in some money to buy replacement CDs.  If I game the CD clubs (Columbia, etc.) then I can wait for their buy one at regular price get unlimited at $1.99 deals and perhaps replace many of the albums.

Or should I replace the turntable?  It was a nice Pioneer PL-300 from 1979 that was pretty good in it's day.  What would you replace it with?  I'm having trouble finding any but the $10K ones with stone slabs for the guy who claims he can "hear" the digital artefacts or some of the speciality ones designed for rap guys to make scratching sounds.

Anybody gone through either of these choices?  What was your experience?  How much did you get for the albums?

 

[Peter]

I bought an earlier version of this a few years back:

http://makeashorterlink.com/?U100257B9

Not too expensive, and works pretty well. The needledoctor site has several other turntables, as well as cartridges and replacement stylii.

Regarding getting rid of the LPs, I think it all depends on what shape they are in. A good LP sounds better than a mediocre CD, in my opinion. Also, I bet some of your albums are not available on CD. Even the ones that have been 'remastered' to CD may well fall into the 'mediocre' category, and sound worse than your old LPs.

Peter

 

[bow-tie]

I can't speak to the quality from an audiophile sense, but I can speak from music fan's perspective.

When it comes to my old AC\DC (with Bon Scott), NOTHING sounds better than vinyl. That is how it was meant to be heard, and CD doesn't duplicate that rich sound IMO.

That's just one example, but to me, its definitely a reason to hold onto the vinyl...

 

[bruce1]

If your TT is still working record your LP's to your computer and copy them to CD's. Play them back either from the computer or a CD player through a tube amp.

If your TT is not working do you know where you can borrow one?

This will take lots of hard drive space.

The LP's are probably not worth much unless they are rare or audiophile pressings.

MY ideas for you to think about.

Bruce

 

[bruce1]

HMMM Must go to attic and dig, This is a good winter project. Five or six hundred LP's up there to convert and Burn to DVD. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida .... I am Iron Man...Paranoid.

 

[bruce1]

OH yes if you have irreplacable LPs that are noisy you can get software to clean up the scratches ect.

Sorry did not think of this on first post.

Bruce

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Consider also completely forgoing the plastic of any kind.

I copied all my cd's to my main pc several years ago, using 128 bit mp3 to maintain near cd quality and small size. WMA does as good a quality sound job with 96 bit. I just put a stack of cd's next to the pc and fed them in every time I walked by. Took a couple of weeks, but it was fairly hassle free.

I then backed all the mp3's up onto a couple of dvd's, a cheap old external hard drive, and a copy on my laptop.

I bought a couple of "mp3 receivers" for about $50 each off of ebay. Dell and Rio both sold the same unit under their brand names. Look for "rio receiver" or "rio audio manager". Basically you run a little piece of s/w on your main pc, and the recieivers connect to it and stream play the music. You can wire them into a receiver or they'll power some small bookshelf speakers. The front lcd panel lets you search by artist, album, type of music, etc. You can use Musicmatch or windows media player to make up playlists. I can play an entire genre of 2000 tunes in random mode all week long if I like, or let the whole 20,000 go at random. We've put together playlists for each of the hollidays...push a button and welcome the guests.

It does require that you have your pc on to 'serve' the music, although rio sold a "rio central' box that acted as a receiver, held all the music on its own internal hard drive, and could rip and write cd's directly. It was WAY too expensive though and I dont see it selling at any kind of discount now that its discontinued.

I also snagged one of Gateways "connected dvd players". Its a fairly good progressive scan dvd player that also has a network connection on the back (wireless or wired) and pc server software. The pc server software can send music, photos or video (as long as its not high bandwidth video) to the dvd player, to be then fed to your receiver, tv or in my case, a projector. I can have hundreds of my digital photos displayed on the big screen while my music collection plays. A little more complicated to setup and use than the rio/dell setup but it has a lot of functionality.

For a while I was running the music on a little "pizza box" machine I made up from a low power, low therms VIA board with integrated cpu, network, sound etc. That whole package cost me under $200 to build given that I had some usable parts. I'm going to replace it with an old laptop shortly as I'd like the thing to have a local screen without having to take up too much space. I had been using "VNC", a freeware product that lets you "take over" another machine console from another pc with a screen.

Big hard drives are cheap these days...$50 for a 160gb. That would hold hundreds of albums even at 320 bit encoding.

Yes, ER is a lot of fun for NERDS!!!

 

[Hyperborea]

Consider also completely forgoing the plastic of any kind.

I copied all my cd's to my main pc several years ago, using 128 bit mp3 to maintain near cd quality and small size.  WMA does as good a quality sound job with 96 bit.  I just put a stack of cd's next to the pc and fed them in every time I walked by.  Took a couple of weeks, but it was fairly hassle free.

All of my CDs are ripped into 160kbps AAC (the audio standard for MPEG4 - much better than MP3).  Yup, it was done by stuffing the discs into the computer while I did other things.  I have a complete copy of my home collection on my machine at work for listening in my office (yeah I coud serve them up from home and access them securely but it is fraught with difficulties and problems).  I also carry a subset of my collection around on my iPod (very worthwhile for public transit and the gym).

I've been considering some form of remote playback capability for the living room stereo such as the Roku Soundbridge http://www.rokulabs.com/  Not sure what to do there yet.

Digitizing the albums (which would require replacing/renting/borrowing a turntable) is going to be a horrendous process.  Think about 400 albums each playing ~40mins but with some time for loading and putting them away plus cleaning the albums in advance (probably better than normal cleaning because this time it is for "posterity") and "cleaning" them electronically afterwards.  That's probably closer to one hour each for a total of 400 hours or 50 8 hour days.  That's far too long - unless one of you retired guys needs a project to keep them busy.

As for plastic in general it may be worthwhile eliminating it as the means to playback but I think it still makes a fine distribution and deep backup medium.  I can buy CDs, if I time it right, at about $3-4 or with less timing for $5-6.  It costs about $10 to buy the digital versions and then you have no backups.

If I can get ~$2 / album (is that too high?) with some going higher and some lower then that will bring about $800 total for the ~400 albums.  If I can time it right then I can buy ~200 CDs and replace much of the collection.  I don't need everything as some are marginal albums I don't want or I am willing to take the "best of" some group instead of 4 albums or some groups can be cut back to 6 or 7 albums instead of 20 plus I already have some duplicates on CD now.  This way I will actually be able to listen to them again plus I will have them for use at work and with my iPod.

Also important is that when I do FIRE and become a PT is that I'm not going to carry around albums or even CDs but I will take digital versions of the music that I own.  This is just a step towards lightening myself before that time.

 

[johnblake]

Hyperborea,
I've haven't ripped and encoded my CD collection yet. I've experimented with MP3 and am concerned that the quality at 128Kbps will not cut it over the long run. I have a few hundred CDs and don't want to do the work twice.

AAC (especially at 196Kpbs) is definitely better but I've been concerned about the compatibility among different vendors. I want to use a standard format that's widely supported.

The only widely available technology that I know about is Apple's iTunes and iPod. Is this the program that you used to rip and encode your CDs? Are the files playable on devices and programs that do not use (license) Apple's technology?

I never want to rely on a single vendor.

Thanks. John

 

[Hyperborea]

AAC (especially at 196Kpbs) is definitely better but I've been concerned about the compatibility among different vendors.  I want to use a standard format that's widely supported.

Depending on what you mean by "standard" and "widely supported" then I think you are left with only the choice of MP3. If you relax "widely supported" to "growing support" then I think you can include AAC. It's only if you relax "standard" that you can include WMA - that's a prorietary technology. There are a bunch of other contenders but I'm not sure if any of them will go anywhere. The most likely of the others is Ogg Vorbis but I'm not sure that it's got any real hope.

The only widely available technology that I know about is Apple's iTunes and iPod.  Is this the program that you used to rip and encode your CDs?  Are the files playable on devices and programs that do not use (license) Apple's technology?

Yup, I used iTunes and it was smooth and easy to use.

There are freeware/shareware implementations of AAC out there and other commercial products. It's going to take some time before it gathers enough steam to knock out MP3 but the quality difference is there for the same bitrate. Apple is not the holder of the license on AAC. It's owned by Dolby and the seller of AAC software owes them a license fee on the sale of software that uses it.

Just one quick find:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php/AAC_implementations

 

[johnblake]

Thanks. I looked into the compatability issue and easily found two implementations other than iTunes. The company 3ivx has a free download (directshow filter) that adds mpeg-4 AAC (.mp4a) support to windows media player. Also, a free player (which is lite) called Foobar2000 that plays .mp4a. I tested both of these implementations with iTunes AAC files and they worked fine.

Time to start ripping.

Thanks.
--J