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Digitizing Rare Vinyl
eldavojohn writes "While the RIAA is busy changing its image to a snake eating its own tail, one man is busy digitizing out-of-print 78s. 'There's a whole world of music that you don't hear anymore, and it's on 78 RPM records,' he stated to Wired. Right now, you can find about 4,000 MP3s on his site, with no digital noise reduction implemented yet."
A Russian has been up to this since the mid-90s, digitizing old Soviet LPs (1930s on up) and putting them on his site (http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/) for free.
It's a very extensive collection, and is worth a look, regardless of what you think about Russia's past or current behavior.
Most 78's (there are exceptions, including the very famous and historically important V-discs) are not vinyl.
They are shellac, or rather a mixture of shellac, wax, slate, and a cotton or paper filler.
I personally believe that the decline of the music industry is directly related to the replacement of shellac with vinyl, and that the RIAA must remedy this decline immediately.
I was expecting someone putting a record into a flatbed scanner
That's been tried, and it sort of works. But ordinary scanners don't have enough resolution. The Library of Congress has a scanner that does. They image the disc at a resolution of 1 micro per pixel, which yields 8 GB or so of imagery. Then they have software which can reconstruct the audio from the image.
Not only is this useful for fragile, unique records, but it will work on cracked or scratched ones. It's even possible to reconstruct a broken record if you have all the pieces.
The current scanner only works for horizontal recording; it can't read depth. So it won't work on vertically recorded records (Edison) or stereo (45/45 Westrex has two components 90 degrees apart.) They're working on that.
And another part too...
The 78 RPM records weren't on Vinyl - it's Shellac, which is a lot more sensitive than Vinyl.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The record is not necessarily a lossy format. While pure digital (mp3s encoded at 320+) gives you a lot of good sound, it still can't compete with the warmth and depth of old fashioned vinyl. I realize a lot of people will disagree with this, but most of those people haven't listened to a record on a high quality turntable through a good amplifier playing on really good speakers.
The difference is highly noticeable.
Sadly, you'll find more folks listening through the speakers that came with their fancy new Dell claiming the difference can't be heard.
The Internet is generally stupid
That was pretty brilliant of the record companies, though, don't you think? Make the medium out of nice, soft vinyl, and make the worthless, replaceable needle out of the hardest mineral on the Mohs scale.
Brilliant, that is, if you want to maximize the rate at which the media wear out.
I have mod points right now, and this post makes me wish there was a "-1 ignorant" rating.
You must be new here. Or at least not tech-savvy or young enough to never have thought about these things.
If you want to minimize wear between two friction surfaces the WORST thing to do is to make them both out of the same material. The best is to make one hard and the other soft. I don't know why this is true, but perhaps someone more versed in mechanical engineering and materials science can explain. In watches, for example (mechanical ones), the jeweled bearings you hear about are typically a sapphire or ruby (synthetic) cone in which a metal (steel or brass) pin rotates, not gem-against-gem. So diamond-against-vinyl makes sense (hard against soft). And not all phonograph needles were diamond; that was a relatively late phenomenon.
But far more important is how the medium -- the record itself in this case -- is manufactured. In some cases they were injection molded (rare), but more often they were pressed. Now think for a second, how are you going to make records, and do it inexpensively enough that you can sell them? Make them out of metal, like steel? And then what, cut each groove? Probably not (although that's exactly how the original lacquer disks were made). A moldable plastic sounds like a good idea. And that's how the majority of disks were (and still are) made: take a hot lump of vinyl, about the size and shape of a hockey puck, and press it between two hot disks of metal into which are carefully machined (ie, cut) grooves. Use enough pressure and the vinyl will replicate nearly every nuance of the mold. Although you can do this with a hard plastic, plastics are all pretty soft, and hard plastics have a regrettable tendency to break easily because they're brittle (like the old 78 RPM disks).
Now, you can argue that perhaps a less expensive material could be used instead of diamond for the needle, and was for a long time (eg, garnet), but the materials cost of industrial diamonds that weigh a few micrograms is next to nothing. The expense is in the shaping (playback needles aren't just pointed cones, at least good ones weren't) since that requires highly specialized equipment and skilled labor.
So, yes, it is brilliant to use diamond and vinyl. Did you ever see black dust or ribbon coming off of a record from the needle -- at least for one that was in proper alignment and not being dragged crosswise? I never did. And I still have my very playable record collection. The wear in records was not from removal of material, as with many wear mechanisms, but in gradual reshaping of the groove as the needle passed through. Thus the progress over time to lighter and lighter contact pressures and lighter and lighter cantilevers, with lighter and lighter moving masses -- eg, the moving magnet approach.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
there is no real technical reason for vinyl to sound better
Sorry, but your link is woefully ignorant and has some really bad inaccuracies. For instance, "The vinyl surface is heated to several hundred degrees on playback, and repeat play of the same track should wait at least several hours until the vinyl has cooled". That is just utter bullshit. Not everything in that article is wrong, but there is much wefully inaccurate information in it.
The 44k samples per second of the CD limits the upper frequencies to 22kHz. Yes, that's higher than you can hear, but all the high frequency harmonics are gone. Those harmonics color the frequencies you CAN hear. Plus, the closer you get to that 22k, the more aliasing you have.
Analog mastering introduces noise, but digital mastering introduces rounding errors and aliasing.
If you have an analog medium from a digital master, or a digital medium from an analog master, you have the worst of both worlds, with th edisadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. The LP of Led Zeppelin's Presence will sound better than the CD (provided your turntable is good enough), while the CD of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit will sound better than an LP version no matter how good your turntable is.
Digital has a far larger dynamic range than analog, but oddly the only place you see those dynamics is in the movies, and they're done badly there. I've wished for a "dynamics compression" module so I could watch a movie where the music wasn't thundering while the speech is berely audible. CDs, OTOH, almost never use the dynamic range they are capable of. I can NOT for the life of me figure out why the LP version of Boston's first album has so much more dynamics than the CD version; technically, the CD should have more dynamics. It's just a matter of bad remastering.
I got a few things wrong in Digital vs. analog- which is better? (tape speed for one), but whoever wrote that wiki you linked should read it.
Also if you want to digitize your own vinyl, read How to rip from vinyl or tape. I should have more strongly stressed in both articles that with analog, the quality of the playback device is of utmost importance for fidelity. Usually with analog equipment (although not always) the more you pay, the better it will sound, even to untrained old ears.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest