Slashdot Mirror

First off, the reason to obtain and collect vinyl recording is clear. 80-90% of all music ever released on LP/45/etc was never re-released on CD. That's an astounding amount of music that is gone - outside of a radio station or movie.

For instance, if you want a recording of most 1950s jukebox songs or even stuff like 70s rock bands... most of it wasn't ever re-released. I guess you could get one of those old-time music collections off of late-night TV, but that's equally lame.

Only two or three years ago at the clamoring of the masses of fans did Jethro Tull, for instance, release their live album in its entirety. This was one of the top 100 albums of all time but the CD chopped out all of the filler which made it good. In fact, almost every live album or double LP set in existence was ether butchered on CD or just not available outside of the "anniversary" set.

Then there's comedy. An entire genre that never made it to CD. Thousands of people and routines that are still as funny as ever... but only on record.(in many cases the artists were dead or didn't have the money to go to CD, since the 80s were dominated by the recording industry which shut you down if you didn't have huge sales. Monty Python for instance - half of their stuff isn't on CD, even today.

Or obscure classics like the original BBC version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Tape and LP only. Finding it on CD... yeah, right. Yet it's one of the best things ever recorded - better than the lame movie that's for sure. There are several audio versions, but not the original radio drama.

And then there's the entire library of music from Motown Records. Thousands of albums... company died at the beginning of the CD era. Yes, there's a revival of the company recently, but it's "classic" - basically the few most famous groups. If you weren't a superstar... sorry.

So it's not just old classical or stuff like Donny Osmond that was on LP. It's an astounding mountain of stuff. Everyone should have a tape deck or record player. The USB is nice, though, since there is software to get rid of the artifacts and problems digitally, then you can encode it at maximum quality to your hard drive(I suggest LAME plus 320K dual-channel stereo at a minimum)

Getting to the solutions:
1: www.dak.com - this was an old company that sold all sorts of oddball audio gear in the 80s. he's back and his software package for recording LPs to digital is probably the most affordable that I know of. You absolutely need a RIAA conversion box unless your amplifier has a phono in/on inside it or the audio will sound quite bad. (they compressed the sound before recording and the circuit de-compresses it to proper levels).

2:www.grado.com - toss the stylus. Get the $80 green one. This sounds virtually identical to their silver and gold models for a reasonable price.(the $60 one, the black is okay. The $80 "green" one is culled out of the blacks by testing to be the top 10% of the black line. the trick is that the hand-picked black models sound as good as the stock sliver models that cost 3-4 times as much.

This humble cartridge beats out $300-$500 audiophile ones. You get huge sound for cheap.(same with grado's headphones - the 60 and 80 are their budget, but sound better/virtually the same as anything under $300(even Grado's other models))

3: http://www.teresaudio.com/haven/cleaner/cleaner.ht ml
This is a good DIY project that will clean most any record spotless. No need to spend $300 on a commercially available model.

Enjoy - go to old garage sales and record stores and buy almost anything. The software will correct most of the flaws and you can resell the LPs once you are happy with the results - so that someone else can enjoy the music.

both computers suffer from problems such as lock-ups, random reboots, and other compatability issues

I'm not a betting person, but if I were I'd put my money on cheap ram. Or at least, on anything but the actual processor. Fire up memtest86 some time and let it crank through it's longest tests, and see if you don't come up with some spotty ram issues.

It's interesting how the DIY hardware scene has changed over the years. The components that used to be no-name commodities are now becoming more critial. If building a system today, I would spend more time worrying about the brand of ram, power supply, and cooling than I ever would have five or ten years ago. It used to be that all you needed to know about ram and heatsinks was "it's 80ns" and "yeah it comes with a fan", respectively.

Hmmm... check your memory, and check that your BIOS is the latest - including all of your motherboard chipset drivers.

Did all that, several times over. SuSE Linux runs fine on the same system. Memtest86 runs fine. System stability has increased with the updates that have become available from MS, I count to 20 "Windows XP Hotfixes" installed right now plus another three "Windows XP Application Compatibility Update", but it's still not there. (These can be seen in Add or Remove Programs in the control panel).

BTW, for testing memory modules, I recommend Memtest86 (GPL:ed) from http://www.teresaudio.com/memtest86/.

I should also point out that the system has been "strip searched" ;-) for error sources. Even swapped the power supply and installed an UPS with surge protection (summer's coming up here, so a good idea anyway) in desparation... I suppose there's some bad interaction with the BIOS - but all one can do is send in those crash dumps (I always do) and wait for them to get it right - if Windows was Open Source, I could at least find out what the cause is on this system. (I have some 20 years experience now of software engineering, so yes, I could do that).

Reality check. PC100 SDRAM CPU to memory is about 200MB/s

No, you are in serious need of a reality check. My 512MB of PC100 SDRAM benchmarks as being around 800MB/s with memtest.

Here are a couple of web sites that agree with this also...

http://www.a1-electronics.co.uk/Memory/SDRAM.sht ml
http://www.pcmech.com/show/memory/154/
http:/ /www.savingxoom.com/ddrmemory1.html

Should I provide more?

Drives don't get better than perhaps 45MB/s for outer diameter of platter and more like 25MB/s for inner diameter,

Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB: 48.8MB/s outer, 29.2MB/s inner.

The Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP does 60.5MB/s outer and 45MB/s inner, for a comparison of a 15k SCSI drive, with a 5.9mS access time.

but this is for a strictly linear transfer from platter to RAM and does not accomodate the +7ms AVERAGE seek time.

Is it not obvious that I am speaking purely about maximum sustained transfer rates? You can't get the maximum values if we're not talking about sequential transfers. But thanks for the pointer AC.

Whether you use parity, non-parity, or even ECC, you should ALWAYS test your RAM sticks with MemTest86.

Test them when newly purchased (I've received duds from brand-name online memory warehouses.) Test them every few months (they can and do go bad.) Especially test when your computer exhibits otherwise unexplainable behavior, like: Windows BSoD, kernel panics, characters changing themselves on disk willy-nilly, programs crashing for no good reason, or going bad on disk and needing reinstallation. Disk files that go corrupt. Any of the above, even (or especially) when it seems inconsistent, can be caused by a few bad blocks in a RAM stick.

MemTest86 is a program that boots and runs off floppy (has its own boot loader, no OS), and t-h-o-r-o-u-g-h-l-y tests your ram. It even detects adjecent cell errors, where a 1 in cell n can threshold bias the 0 in cell n+1 or n-1 until it is considered a 1.

It even knows how to differentiate between cache memory errors and RAM errors. Just do it (after nightmare hardware problems, MemTest86 showed me what was broken- can't say enough good things about it.) It's user interface could be more informative, but when it spots and error, you'll know.

Slackware doesn't by default (well, not of 8.0 anyway) but it's an option if you want it. We'll just wait until all those RedHat, SuSE and Mandrake kiddies have a few crashes and the bugs get worked out :-)
Seriously though, I have upgraded my kernel many times over my base Slackware 8 install, compiled many apps, and many new NVidia drivers for my (hastily bought without much of a clue) TNT2 Ultra card all without any serious problems. X has only crashed on me about twice in the last year.
I reckon if your machine is flaky it's likely to be a badly-configured kernel (maybe running EXPERIMENTAL/UNSTABLE features) or bad RAM. I got caught out by that one. On x86 hardware memtest86 is your friend.

When's the last time you checked your RAM? I get about 1 bad module for every 2 machines. Defects usually show up on the initial test, though some don't show up for a few years.

Don't believe me? Try it yourself; Memtest86. I suggest running one full test (can take days) when you first build a machine, and when you run into odd problems that you can't figure out. The default tests are good, but I've had times where it did miss problems.

They always forget that scratching is just one little part of the experience of playing vinyl on a turntable.

Yes - one that leads to wailing and gnashing of teeth!

Tearing vinyl and snapping cantilevers - the stuff nightmares are made of.

But if you want some Real Audio and serious hacking try a DIY turntable and motor controler and a real Tone Atm. Of cause all real cartridges require manual hacking.