If you have fallen asleep we are now at the creation of MK vinyl 2 CD in 2003 and the digital age is moving on at a fast pace so I decided it was time to down size my music collection by unpacking some of the cardboard storage boxes we had in the loft, both me and my wife Julie had our own vinyl records and audio cassette tapes as well as I had still remaining a couple of old Reel to Reels (they keep cropping up don’t they).

I had a fairly good hi fi set up and read up on how I could link up the hi fi system to my computer to be able to record from the vinyl records and the audio cassettes and transfer them to the digital domain.

The same principles apply when connecting up audio leads know the inputs and outputs and remember the output of a given piece of equipment has to go into an input of the receiving machine and get the left and right channels correct too?

I was easily able to get the RCA phono output from my amplifier to the 3.5mm input jack on my sound card using a simple 2 x RCA Phono male to 1 X 3.5mm stereo male plug this lead was 2 metres long. The audio came through loud and clear and the recording was very good aside from pop and crackle from the playing surface of the vinyl record.

I did a few vinyl records as a test and then began to look at how to lessen the surface noise from the vinyl. There was a few audio editing software packages around at the time so I tried Goldwave it did take a bit of trial and error and the results were pretty good but there seemed to be a dullness to the audio as filtering out pops and clicks really did take the brightness out of the recording leaving a sometimes lifeless piece of music, I did ask a few people to have a listen and some were amazed at how good the audio sounded and others said it was acceptable but not as good as a CD.

Then followed a trial of different audio software packages some offering a bit more than others but like so many packages out there all had good points but the ideal would have been a bit of each so this I did for a while recording on one package, filtering on another and compiling on yet another, I must point out that for me being almost blind I was trying to find software packages that would be compatible with My JAWS speech screen reader from Freedom Scientific made in the USA.

Further searching on the internet I came across www.cedaraudio.co.uk who were based in Cambridge and clearly offered a hardware solution to the pop and click removal but at a price tag of £4,000 wow! That is serious money so I contacted them to get a demo and was amazed at the quality of the products so my plan was to set up my own small business in audio transfer to partly fund the equipment upgrade that was necessary to get professional results.
So I came up with the name of MK Vinyl 2 CD or mkvinyl2cd.co.uk the MK relating to my postal code area and the vinyl 2 cd encompassing what I aimed to do, the only reason I went for the number 2 in between the vinyl and CD was the word ‘to’ was already a domain name already in use in the USA.

My next purchase was a professional record cleaning machine and I went for the Moth Pro MK2 a very sturdy not too smart looking machine but would do the business so to speak. I also changed my PC and invested in a custom built beast with on board digital inputs and outputs as the analogue to digital conversion was done by the Cedar Audio hardware before the signal reached the computer.

I have written a short article on how I transfer Vinyl To Digital which gives a bit more in depth information but by no means full of technical jargon so feel free to have a read.