Steve Gutenberg says he still plays some records that are his favorites, that he bought 50 years ago! That should be long enough.
Then there is this:
https://www.instructables.com/Bring-Ruined-Records-Back-to-Life/
Then there is this:
https://www.instructables.com/Bring-Ruined-Records-Back-to-Life/
Yikes! Don't do that. Notice that he's wet washing the LP... huh? But he's also ruining the label... yikes...
Most records that have had hard lives were owned by people that mistreated them and had crappy audio setups. Typically with cheap large "needles" that wrecked the top of the groove "valley".
A typical High End cartridge has a finer stylus and it plays on a different, lower, part of the valley.
So, do a good wet and/or ultrasonic wash to get rid of the gunk and play those LPs with a modern, high quality set up and you will be astonished at how good the LP can sound.
Sure, big ticks and pops may not go away... but the vast majority of noise, pops, ticks, wear and tear dissappear.
Most records that have had hard lives were owned by people that mistreated them and had crappy audio setups. Typically with cheap large "needles" that wrecked the top of the groove "valley".
A typical High End cartridge has a finer stylus and it plays on a different, lower, part of the valley.
So, do a good wet and/or ultrasonic wash to get rid of the gunk and play those LPs with a modern, high quality set up and you will be astonished at how good the LP can sound.
Sure, big ticks and pops may not go away... but the vast majority of noise, pops, ticks, wear and tear dissappear.
Tony, the OP is in the Maldives currently, having moved there from Sri Lanka.
The place is a small group of islands, mostly a tourist destination. Quite distant from the mainland, in the Indian Ocean. High cost of living.
There is little chance of obtaining records locally, unless it was a well preserved estate find, given the hot and humid climate in both locations.
You seem to have bought yours new, and they have been handled by a very small group of informed people, and played on proper machines.
Compare that to a flea market find, or any other sale for that matter, which is taking a chance.
Hence my opinion that this is a strange quest.
The place is a small group of islands, mostly a tourist destination. Quite distant from the mainland, in the Indian Ocean. High cost of living.
There is little chance of obtaining records locally, unless it was a well preserved estate find, given the hot and humid climate in both locations.
You seem to have bought yours new, and they have been handled by a very small group of informed people, and played on proper machines.
Compare that to a flea market find, or any other sale for that matter, which is taking a chance.
Hence my opinion that this is a strange quest.
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Wow. Didn't spot that. Probably makes everything considerably more difficult.
Can't the OP get his stuff online?
I've got about 75% of mine new, the rest used. I bought a couple of collections and I used to buy quite a few used LPs from the late 80s to the 00's when people were "dumping" their records. There used to be quite a few used record stores in SoCal then.
Yes, I did notice the Maldives...
A short taxi ride in the Maldives costs almost as much as Dubai, and everything, including fuel, is shipped in.
The cost of living in Dubai is less than London but more than Spain...
The OP has posted about cardboard enclosures for speakers, the cost of shipping in records will be far too much for the average person.
I am quoted 960 Rupees (Almost $12) for a 2 kilo parcel, 30 x 20 x 10 cm, without any additional services, by the Indian Post Office.
So the price will be $6 a kilo, or say a 25 kilo parcel with a few records, nicely packed, will cost about $300 just in shipping, the records or whatever merchandise will be extra.
Documents may be costlier.
Your call.
The cost of living in Dubai is less than London but more than Spain...
The OP has posted about cardboard enclosures for speakers, the cost of shipping in records will be far too much for the average person.
I am quoted 960 Rupees (Almost $12) for a 2 kilo parcel, 30 x 20 x 10 cm, without any additional services, by the Indian Post Office.
So the price will be $6 a kilo, or say a 25 kilo parcel with a few records, nicely packed, will cost about $300 just in shipping, the records or whatever merchandise will be extra.
Documents may be costlier.
Your call.
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A lending library (they rented out records, and transferred them to cassette) sold their entire collection of records, about 1000, some were USA box packs, along with the music system, for just 10,000 Rupees in 1985, in Bangalore, I had thought of a much higher figure, so did not ask their price.
But those records had been played many times on different systems, so the condition would not have been good.
And in India the on line sellers of used items do not have an attractive reputation. People prefer to see the goods in person before paying for the stuff.
But those records had been played many times on different systems, so the condition would not have been good.
And in India the on line sellers of used items do not have an attractive reputation. People prefer to see the goods in person before paying for the stuff.
I'll bet there is a way to do that, but at that stage, why not just acquire a completely digital setup and get it over with?
Yes I am, but our family does travel hack home. In fact, last December I was in Sri Lanka, but did not even take a glance at my 20 or so records I have there, from review records given to me, some garage sale records, and an LP I ordered online but that turned out to have damage - skipping and so on, which my audio professional down the road had a tough time converting to digital. At that time each record conversion cost about $2. The other records converted fine, so it was not his equipment. He had about 10 turntables, cassette decks the whole lot.
I hope to be traveling to Sri Lanka and Bangkok later this year, and I hope to pick up my old records and purchase some in Bangkok, having located via web search used records stores there. I could buy online, and have already done so, with my cheap record player to test out vinyl again. I may be getting a used turntable from a relative in August, and can pick it up in December. There are no record stores here, nor are there any Hi-Fi stores, but powered speakers, Bluetooth ovals and so on are available at a price.
I did get two Wharfedale speakers shipped over here from Sri Lanka in February 2022, cost with shipping was about $80. I could have got a pair for half that, however, there were some aesthetic considerations let me say, involved.
To the other points.
I was on my way to a fully digital setup. In fact I plan to convert all my records to digital since it seems to retain much of the quality, again I will have to see what a DIY setup will get me. I cannot purchase Amazon mp3s and many of the streaming services are not available here. I also dislike paying a fee for the rest of my life to listen to music. I would rather own the material. Streaming means internet costs and internet outages.
I think I have covered everything.
By the way, this thread is no longer about error correction, so I will have to start a new thread about 'journeying into vinyl' to describe my past and future experiences. It will be article, or a book, from an amateur point of view.
The test is for MM cartridges. Due to them being high impedance, their frequency response is always going to be altered by cable capacitance and preamp input impedance. This doesn't happen on MC cartridges.
Many MC cartridges have ruler-flat response in the most important region (say, 30-10KHz or even 30-20KHz). Flatter response than many revered studio microphones, flatter than almost all speakers out there, and certainly many studio tape recorders too. Phase response is also better than many analog tape recorders. Impulse response is (lol) better than many DAC converters operating on redbook audio, simply because this system doesn't require a brickwall filter near 20-22KHz.
How about this image, for example? This is a Denon DL-S1 cartridge. This is the combined frequency response of the cutting head used to make the test record, the vinyl pressing process, and the DL-S1 cartridge itself.
It is ruler flat up to about 15Khz and it has usable frequency response to 50KHz, then it stops because the test record stops there. Higher frequencies have experimentally been recorded on vinyl records.
Granted, the image does not show performance below 1KHz but other tests show it is also ruler flat down to 20Hz.
Again, this is not just the response of the cartridge, this is the response of the complete analog record-replay chain. The cutting head of a lathe, thanks to motional feedback, is one of the most linear mechanical or audio devices ever manufactured. This why "direct-cut" records in the late 70s compated favorably to recordings done on state-of-the-art analog recorders.
Distortion, unlike other devices, is
a. Proportional to recorded level,
b. being only significant on the loudest, loudest signals -- quite the opposite of redbook digital audio, where dither needs to be added otherwise distortion is inversely proportional to recorded level and can get brutally high on the softest sounds.
c. Mostly 2nd harmonic distortion, and thus inaudible by a human being even at what would appear to be a high level such as 1% or even more.
Actual record-replay response of vinyl records goes from 20Hz to 50KHz, this is not a myth or theory, it is routinely achieved on half-speed-mastered records and on CD4 quadraphonic records. Most quality MC pickups and most MM pickups can also reproduce up to 50KHz with no problem, as is confirmed on the people who replay CD4 records.
Should i go on? Should i go on on how noise at the high end of the spectrum is comparable to dithered digital 44/16 recordings?!
Vinyl playback is not better than state-of-the-art digital, but you cannot draw any sound quality conclusions by looking at a few figures without context or interpretation.
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Indeed, in the late 70s DBX-encoded records appeared to remove surface noise, pops and ticks. The system works big time.
In theory the system could give a lower noise floor than even the digital recordings of the day (with 16bit depth), and with (theorically) more than 120dB dynamic range achievable.
I always wondered why the system had no commercial success.
However, now that I properly clean my records, I know a possible reason: Some of my better records play really, really quiet, with very good signal/noise ratio, indeed good enough for relaxing and enjoying the music. Some of them have simply no audible ticks or almost no ticks; I find this is not only a function of how well cared the record is, but also of the quality of the vinyl compound.
I'm not a huge expert on turntables, and only had memories of record players used when I was in school that was scratchy as heck.
But from what I heard, Audio Technica makes a Bluetooth enabled turntable.
You can't have Bluetooth without making it digital.
I'm sure error corrections could be built into the Bluetooth transmitter, it would be necessary because interference happens.
But audio Technica also makes this sound burger turntable, literally a portable turntable about the size of a really long smartphone that clamps over a record to play it. You can see their speed and vibration control is going to be absolutely horrendous. It wouldn't sound right without error corrections.
There's even a small record player thingie that looks like a hot wheel car that "drives" on a record to play it, presumably transmitting the audio via Bluetooth.
I'm sure all sorts of proposals exist.
But from what I heard, Audio Technica makes a Bluetooth enabled turntable.
You can't have Bluetooth without making it digital.
I'm sure error corrections could be built into the Bluetooth transmitter, it would be necessary because interference happens.
But audio Technica also makes this sound burger turntable, literally a portable turntable about the size of a really long smartphone that clamps over a record to play it. You can see their speed and vibration control is going to be absolutely horrendous. It wouldn't sound right without error corrections.
There's even a small record player thingie that looks like a hot wheel car that "drives" on a record to play it, presumably transmitting the audio via Bluetooth.
I'm sure all sorts of proposals exist.
The whole purpose of the turntable is to play records and to output a signal that represents the physical contents in the groove. Why digitize it at all? Enjoy it for what it is. That little thingie that runs around the record is quite the novelty, but sound-wise, it's a joke. Big thing is to have a turntable-arm-cartridge that is correctly set up and aligned, and it's feeding a correctly EQ'ed (RIAA) preamp. If you want to digitize records to archive them that's fine.
I got several such turntables...
An Android Tablet, a USB-OTG cable, a USB DAC and a subscription to Tidal HiFi
Seriously, the notion of a turntable with built in ADC and Bluetooth just misses the entire point of playing analog.
Once upon a time, like in the 90s, I got into AD/DACs so I could record my LPs. Currently I got an RME ADI-2 Pro FS which is likely as good as it gets outside of a laboratory. For the last 20 years or so, I've also been recording to 24/96 WAV files.
With Cubase I can process the audio files to remove the ticks ( just cut off a snippet of the rising edge... that's all ) and processing the sound to remove noise.
Works great but
(1) The time spent is serious and steals precious listening time.
(2) My analog set up is very good now, so I'd rather play the records.
(3) My Tidal HiFi subscription has access to almost all my LPs.
(4) No matter how good my ADC is, then I go swap the cartridge, phono preamp and/or upgrade the turntable... and all of those recordings are made become obsolete.
So, just keep your records clean, enjoy them and only record the very few that are not in Tidal.
An Android Tablet, a USB-OTG cable, a USB DAC and a subscription to Tidal HiFi
Seriously, the notion of a turntable with built in ADC and Bluetooth just misses the entire point of playing analog.
Once upon a time, like in the 90s, I got into AD/DACs so I could record my LPs. Currently I got an RME ADI-2 Pro FS which is likely as good as it gets outside of a laboratory. For the last 20 years or so, I've also been recording to 24/96 WAV files.
With Cubase I can process the audio files to remove the ticks ( just cut off a snippet of the rising edge... that's all ) and processing the sound to remove noise.
Works great but
(1) The time spent is serious and steals precious listening time.
(2) My analog set up is very good now, so I'd rather play the records.
(3) My Tidal HiFi subscription has access to almost all my LPs.
(4) No matter how good my ADC is, then I go swap the cartridge, phono preamp and/or upgrade the turntable... and all of those recordings are made become obsolete.
So, just keep your records clean, enjoy them and only record the very few that are not in Tidal.
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dBx was always very expensive and it was hard to use for turntables since it had to be sort of recalibrated for every LP as their recording levels varied. The market is always driven by casual consumers who didn't care for the cost or hassle of setting up their systems.
For turntables, there is no magic cure for S/N... spend the money on designing and manufacturing very good mechanical components: bearings, motor assembly, tone arm, stiff tonearm, quiet phono preamp, specially designed belt with Loch Ness magical potions, etc...
Cleaning the records is also essential... BUT, not enough.