Digitizing Vinyl Records with Audacity

Posted Nov 7, 2008 0:31 UTC (Fri) by nyarvin (subscriber, #55077)
Parent article: Digitizing Vinyl Records with Audacity

Another thing to note is that if you're connecting your turntable directly to the computer (rather than through a preamp), you should apply the RIAA preamp filter in Audacity. Audio preamps have circuitry which does this -- it's part of why the "phono" input is special -- but doing it digitally is probably more accurate, and doesn't involve connecting up an extra box. The RIAA filter lowers the amplitude of the higher-frequency components; the idea is that before records are made, the reverse of this filter is applied to the signal; so to play a record accurately, you need to apply this filter. Audacity has it under the "Effect" menu, in "Equalization".

Digitizing Vinyl Records with Audacity

Posted Dec 23, 2008 22:00 UTC (Tue) by cook (subscriber, #4) [Link]

>Another thing to note is that if you're connecting your turntable directly >to the computer (rather than through a preamp), you should apply the RIAA >preamp filter in Audacity.
Be careful here, the phono preamp not only does the RIAA equalization,
it also has a ton of gain to bring the tiny magnetic pickup levels
up to "line level". Connecting the phono pickup directly to a sound
card would probably result in a very low level recording with a lot of
hiss. I would not use the higher gain "mic" inputs on most sound cards
either, they tend to be noisy and most of them are mono-only.
An outboard preamp produces the best results.