Taking Care of Your Old LPs - Transferring to CD Part 1

Mar

19

Taking Care of Your Old LPs - Transferring to CD Part 1

≡ Category: Equipment, Loose Talk |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

THE PROBLEM

A lot of old fogies (like me) may have a library of 500 or more LPs left over from back in the days before CDs. And a good thing, too. A lot of those old LPs were never reissued as CDs.

Or maybe you’ve heard about some classic LP that isn’t available on CD (see my post Why You Still Need to Own a Turntable) and, heaven forbid, you’re starting a small LP collection.

What do you do when you want to hear one of your LPs? Take it out of the cardboard sleeve, plop it on the turntable and let ‘er rip?

Well, if that’s what you’re doing, every time you listen to your record, you’re degrading the quality of the vinyl it’s pressed on. Every time a phonograph needle passes over the record, it wears down the grooves. Every time you take the record out of it’s sleeve, it’s like rubbing the vinyl with fine sandpaper, EVEN if you’re smart enough to store your records in archival sleeves.

Better to play the record once, when you need to make a CD. How do you do that? Well, there are a number of ways. I’ll start with the simplest.

CD RECORDER COMBOS

For the technophobe, stereo manufacturers have thoughtfully made it easy for us by creating turntable/CD recorder combos. Here is a well-reviewed example, the TEAC LP-R400 Turntable CD Recorder.

The advantage of such a system is that it’s a cinch to transfer your records to CD. In the case of the TEAC above, this combo turntable/recorder will even be able to sense track breaks on the record and transfer them to CD.

But what if you want to have more control? What if you want compile only the best tracks from several records, for example? Then you’re going to need a more complex solution.