This is an added part to part 1 of my 3 part series on digitizing vinyl:
Digitizing Vinyl: Part 1
Digitizing Vinyl: Part 2
Digitizing Vinyl: Part 3
Need to add a couple of items to part 1… this does NOT supersede part 1, it adds a “what to do if”…
I bought a copy of Herb Alpert’s Rise album, Originally released in 1979. It was in the 50 cent bin at Homers in Omaha, one of 12 albums I bought when I was on my trip last month. The record is pristine. Initially I wondered why it was in pristine shape and noticed a sticker on the front of the album cover… It’s encoded in dbx.
Not many of those dbx encode/decode units around anymore, right? Well I just happen to have one laying around… I picked it up cheap at a yard sale when I was stationed at McGuire… you don’t know how many times this thing was almost dumped in the trash bin over the years.
So… I’m in the process of digitizing this album as I’m building this post. The most notable thing to point out is the DEAD SILENCE between tracks. I didn’t expect this but there’s absolutely no surface noise from the record:
This section is of the leader at the very beginning of the last track on side 2. Notice how flat the wave form is before the first beat of the music starts. There’s no additional audio processing there, just the decoding provided by the dbx box that I’ve had on the shelf in the garage for 15 years and before that was moved from place to place over the years while I was in the military… I’ve NEVER used it to decode anything before today, most tapes were recorded in Dolby-B or Dolby-C so it didn’t see much use… I did experiment with it, but found I couldn’t record tapes with it and expect them to sound good in the car unless the car stereo had dbx decode in it…
As far as digitizing, except for putting the dbx encode/decode box in-line between the turntable and the sound card on the computer, I followed the exact same steps to capture the album as part 1 of this series.