Quote from: Maxvla on March 20, 2013, 09:56:46 PM

Needle drop vinyl is the only way to go on some albums even if you are a digital only user. I will be doing that in cooperation with Morbidtoaster once he gets his needle drop rig set up. Mostly he just needs to get a Lynx Hilo he has everything else except a few misc cables.

Indeed. Needle dropping takes a lot of skill and patience though. I wish you could just put together some good hardware, run it through click repair and be done with it, but it's just not that easy. A friend of mine does an absolutely amazing job with a very modest Technics direct drive table, Simaudio phono pre, and a pretty basic A-D converter. He does all the processing by hand though, and the results are first rate. I've also heard drops done on hyper expensive tables that've had serious problems with rumble or otherwise sound like crap. Just throwing money at it definitely doesn't work.

Thought it was about time I joined up since Maxvla links me to these threads enough already. 

Anyway, I realize that it'll be a tough road to go down but I'm willing to dedicate all my free time and effort into making these needle drops good. Any advice would be more than welcome. The equipment I'm planning on getting will be more than adequate, but nothing helps more than a good technique.

To stay somewhat on topic, I hate Dave Grohl, but man I enjoyed the hell out of Sound City. It was just excellent. Immediately after watching it I decided I needed the soundtrack (assuming of course it was available on vinyl, being 'all analog' as it were). Was shocked to see the CD is such bad shape. I'd really love to needle drop the LPs once I get the rig together and see if it was done right there.

Computer Audiophile has a decent guide on how to get into needle dropping. I will say that I probably would suggest not using Audacity as in the article. I've heard a lot of drops recorded in Audacity, and pretty much all of them just sound like a quiet CD. I don't know if that's something to do with Audacity or whether it's just coincidence that just about every bleh vinyl recording I've heard just happens to use it. I can say though that all of the drops I've been really impressed with have not used Audacity - they were done in Wavelab, Soundforge, etc. Something at least semi-professional.

As I said the best drops also use CR and Izotope in full manual mode, no automatic de-click and no de-noise.

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/486-guide-converting-analog-vinyl-digital-files-using-windows/

I read through this article recently actually and learned a lot. I'm perfectly willing to do it all manually if it means it comes out better.

Lynx suggested Channel D's Pure Vinyl and while it looks promising it uses software RIAA and I'd rather not fiddle with mic pres. I'm going to send them an email to see if I can turn it off and just let my stage do the RIAA. The program seems quite solid otherwise.

Thanks for the suggestions. It's a shame Audacity might not be the best option, but free can't always be the best either.

Pure Vinyl as far as I know is Mac only. There's a Mac version of the guide that covers that as well as Amarra vinyl and Vinyl Studio.

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/503-guide-converting-analog-vinyl-digital-files-using-macintosh/

I'd be using a Mac. I saw that there was going to be a Mac version but I couldn't seem to find it when I looked. Thanks for the link.