What happens to a vinyl record when it arrives at mkvinyl2cd.co.uk, it will surprise many customers as I know some customers do think that the cost to transfer vinyl records to digital is quite disproportional to the cost of the vinyl record whether a 7 inch single or a 12 inch LP.
When we buy in services we are first and formost buying time and expertise from a professional and depending on what that project may involve based on labour, materials etc will denote the cost.
From start to finish a 12 inch LP takes about 1.5 hours to transfer to CD, our first aim is to give the vinyl a deep clean and vacuum on a professional record cleaning machine, I use the MOTH Pro MK2 which offers a robust and reliable machine to work with. I am in control of the cleaning action, application of cleaning fluids and vacuum time as some machines do this all for you which may save you ‘hands on time’ but can mean spending more time if the cleaning was not thorough. The cleaning fluid used is dependant on the level of soiling on the record and we use organic fluids to ensure the playing surface is not likely to suffer any damage due to some high strength non organic solutions.
Our next stage is to place the record on the turntable and set up for recording. We do not use a basic USB plug in turntable but reliable higher end hi fi decks and in my case I use the Rega Planar 5 fitted with a goldring 1042 stylus and cartridge. We record at 24bit and 96000khz to achieve a good result in a .wav format.
At this point our set up chain is vinyl turntable to pre amp, to the HHB Pro 850 Cd recorder where the signal is converted into the digital signal as the Cd recorder unit offers great controllability of the signal in to allow for accurate adjustment in level and output to the www.cedaraudio.co.uk Declick rack mounted unit and then the final journey of the signal is to the hard disk on the PC.
At this point the digital signal is recorded by our chosen software program and in my case I use sony soundforge Pro primarily as I am visually impaired and need to use speech software soundforge allows for great accessibility via my access software.
Once we have the digital file we can then edit and compile as required so such things like sound enhancement, normalising signal, track seperating can be done. It would also be at this point we assess the audio files for suitability of our storage means for the customer such things as file formats like MP3, FLAC or WAV are considered but much depends on how the customer intends to listen or work with the audio.