Magic and Lies

Taking on the ‘crap in, crap out’ homily, it follows that cleaning the record properly before recording it means a considerable reduction in crackle and pop.

In fact, the manufacturing process for vinyl leaves a fair amount of chemical residue in the grooves in any case, so there is an argument for properly cleaning a record before it is ever played. The traditional methods of cleaning, bristle brush or anti static pad, do remove a fair amount of dirt – the rest, they redistribute, deep into the grooves, where the needle grinds it into the playing surface…

The professional cleaning system is essentially a two phase process. A cleaning fluid is applied and worked into the grooves by firm application of a brush, while the record rotates – this spreads the cleaning fluid across the whole surface. The nature of the fluid is a question for debate – some favour distilled water, others a chemical mixture which is supposed to work on a similar principal to shampoo – ever noticed how clean your fingernails are after washing your hair?

The VPI system I use, supplies a chemical mix and the bristle brush required to work it into the grooves. The machine rotates the record on a turntable powered by a very powerful motor – the power is converted into torque, not speed – the record is rotated at a constant low speed,  the brush held firmly enough to  slightly bend the bristles against the record. A few drops of the solution across the record are enough to spread a film over the whole playing surface -  avoid getting the solution onto the label.

The second phase employs a vacuum cleaner to lift the solution, dirt and all off the playing surface. The VPI deploys a hollow cylinder, padded with velvet to prevent scratching the surface of the record. The residue is sucked off the record and deposited into a steel tank inside the device – this can be emptied periodically.

Once the solution has been spread across the record, move the vacuum arm above the record and flick the vacuum switch – a noise like a jumbo jet will terrify small animals, but the record will be spotless. Allow the record to rotate twice, any more than this will cause static to build up and any dust in the vicinity of the record will immediately attach itself to the surface…. be aware that if the record was visibly dirty then some dust will be present inside the inner sleeve. Many people replace the inner sleeve – use one with a clear polythene lining, the paper ones scratch….

After many false starts, blind alleys etc, I think I’ve more or less got this sorted so – this post and several more will attempt to document the exact process, hardware and software used to create high quality digital audio files from vinyl.

The Hardware

• VP1 Record Cleaner
• Technics SL 1210 MkII Turntable
• ART Accessories USB Phono plus
• 1 Nikkai USB A to USB B Cable
• 1 Nikkai Stereo 3.5mm Jack to Twin Phono Lead
• 1 Soundblaster Live! Sound Card
• Dell Dimension PC 256mb Memory
• Altec Lansing Multimedia Speakers

Software

• Vinyl Studio (www.alpinesoft.co.uk)
• dbPowerAmp Music Converter

Most of the hardware I already owned – but I heed the words of a wise old sound engineer from my DJ’ing days – ‘Garbage in, Garbage out’ he would mutter, as I insisted on soundchecking the newest Alien Sex Fiend 12 inch… he had a point, though it took me quite a while to appreciate it.

The VP1 record cleaner is therefore first on the list. You might think £450 is a lot to pay for a record cleaner, but this device is the closest thing to magic I’ve come across – the secret is in the vacuuming, using conventional bristle or cloth cleaners on a recored simply moves the dust around or worse, pushes it deep into the grooves. Unless a record is actually scratched, this device will pretty much restore vinyl to its original condition. As an ex DJ, much of my vinyl is severely manhandled, nightclubs are not the most vinyl friendly environment, so this device is worth it’s considerable weight in gold.

The Technics SL1210 is similarly a souvenir of the DJ’ing days – still the turntable of choice in the DJ’ing trade due to extreme robustness and simplicity – you simply can’t go wrong with a deck of this quality.

Art Accessories USB Phono+ is the pre-amp that the record player requires to amplify the signal enough to make it usable. This handy device is very straightforward to set up – connect the deck to the inputs, the outputs to your sound card using the Nikkai Stereo 3.5mm Jack to Twin Phono Lead, which takes stereo output from the Technics into a single stereo input for your soundcard. The Device can be powered from the USB port of the PC.

The Art Accessories product comes with a music editing package called Audacity. This I found to be effective, but tedious to use. I elected to use Vinyl Studio instead, for the simple reason that Vinyl Studio will estimate the track breaks, edit out the ‘thump’ of the needle dropping and download the track listing from amazon if it’s available. The reason this is important is that recording the vinyl gives you two humongous .wav files – one for each side. These need to be split into individual tracks before converting to the format of your choice. Vinyl Studio outputs to .wav and .mp3 only. This is where dbPowerAmp Music converter earns it’s crust.

That explains the components – next post will start detailing the process.