Vinyl to PC, best (cheap) method

[0iD]

Thought it was about time to store some of my more precious vinyl on the PC. Not got a Huge budget, £100 - £120 for a turntable + pre-amp. Any suggestions?

[chuckskull]

Turntable and phono to 3.5mm from maplins. Bout a fiver. Should be able to just plug it in and away you go. Most sound recording software has the ability to remove clicks and skips too.

[g8ina]

That wont work unless the TT has a phono stage built in.... You need not only pre-amplification, but also RIAA equalisation.

The Project series of TTs are pretty good as are the Rega Planars, and the NAD pre-amp is also excellent (I have both ) - ebay might bring some surprises :-

#260096898773 Project TT
#260095481657 Rega TT
#300092414113 PreAmp

hth

[Fabula]

Spend more than 5quid on the phono to 3.5mm ack. I used one of those for a while to digitise old tapes.
After a while I upgraded to some QED one for about 25quid, and suddenly most of the noise in the recordings vanished. I had been using a decent Marantz tape deck, and decent sound card, but a dodgy connector.

A decent cable will significantly reduce the need to process the audio afterwards to remove hiss etc. But 20 quid or so will get you a decent cable.

Investigate ebay for a turntable and preamp.

[0iD]

Cheers chaps, hitting up ebay shortly

[redlight]

You can pick up Sony turntables on Ebay for little money. Most have built in phono pre-amps. I use a PSLX250H(£15.00 off ebay) connected to my soundcard and I use the old favorite Groovemechanic for clicks and rumbles.

[unrealrocks]

Another vote for the Project turntables ... IMO I would spend as much money as you can on the turntable and preamp, most soundcards around nowadays are very similar (unless you start spending a lot of money on them) ... maybe look in to the Digidesign mBox - they can be had for £80 off eBay and are about as good as it gets for budget soundcards

[kushtibari]

Project - Good value fit and forget. I've had a couple in the past and they were excellent vfm. One of them was the Debut III Phono SB - very handy as it had the phono stage built in. 2nd hand they go for about your budget.

Rega Planar - 2 or 3 are both nice sounding decks. A nice Planar 3 with an RB250 arm might be top end of your budget but very nice sound and you won't lose money on it.

Phono stage - Cambridge do a very good one for a low cost. I also had a Project Phonobox SE that was a nice one. Eliminated a lot of the background noise and 2nd hand they might go as low as £50-£70.

I'd be very tempted by this Goldring off ebay if noone else bids for it - good arm and cartridge and they get a good press, although I've never heard one.

[shampy]

Using audio software can digitize vinyl recordings. Just connect the Audio-Out of your player to Audio-In of the sound card using a stereo audio cable and regarding the software for recording, I do it with FlexiMusic Wave Editor, an easy to use, audio recorder.