Hello All!
Thought I'd introduce myself - I have a brief period of peace between a hectic work schedule and semi-hectic after-hours schedule, the latter involving messing around with electronics, sous vide devices and demanding foreign girlfriends. Naturally, electronics takes preference, and, as it is so happens, audio plays a part of that, although, I must humbly admit, not perhaps in the way you lot are used to. I'll leave that to later inquiry, if anybody is interested - my main occupation with the frequency spectrum has been at the outer extremes of the audio one.
However...
I joined the forum only recently, because I have finally decided to investigate the one frequency band I have sort of only paid lip service to, sort of
What sparked this? Weeell, (and I hate to say this, Skollie), I finally got around to hauling out an old turntable I snagged after my grandfather died a few years ago, and found out that it was a pretty good one. Since then I've been trolling Teh Interwebz for information and putting together plans for converting my large collection of vinyl to digital format. Along the way I've found that, although I'm damn good at design and construction of pretty much any analog and digital circuitry, I'm a little clueless about what is actually happening out there right now from a user point of view.
So I thought I'd drop in and gather opinions, advice, insults, and share the same
To give a little more background: I'm an electronics engineer (B.Sc. and Higher National Diploma), with around 20 year experience in R&D. My main field is RF, I have designed world class stuff in the HF/VHF bands. I have worked with VLF (sonar) for underwater apps, messed with lasers, dabbled with LEDs that will melt your eyes, screwed around with robotics, designed and played with fire sensors, built audio amps and speakers that would make your ears bleed. I'll skip the "leaping tall buildings in a single bound" bit, nobody ever believes that. Until they see it
Audio-wise, I'm pretty much your standard run-of-the-mill consumer currently. I own an iPod, I have herds of mp3s, some FLAC stuff, about 600 LPs, high end sound card in PC, home built 120W amp, about 5 other hand-me-down component amps, 4 sets of mediocre speakers, the best pair currently being couple of Kenwoods since my Mordaunt-Shorts got stolen a while back.
Oh, the turntable! It's a Garrard M301, with an Ortofon RS212 arm, and a few cartridges and accessories. I'm busy designing a decent preamp for it after falling over backwards at the price of preamps on Amazon. No way I'm paying that amount of money for something I can build myself.
So, that's it, in a nutshell. I'd be interested if anybody has advice to share on the turntable and ideal interfacing, especially when it comes to RIAA curves. I have an unobtainable series of 78's which I wish to digitise, for example, and I know that some manufacturers (eg. Decca) had specific RIAA profiles when they cut their discs. Considering degradation when playing vinyl, I want to make sure I have the optimal recording system before diving in to reproduction.
Cheers!
EB
Thought I'd introduce myself - I have a brief period of peace between a hectic work schedule and semi-hectic after-hours schedule, the latter involving messing around with electronics, sous vide devices and demanding foreign girlfriends. Naturally, electronics takes preference, and, as it is so happens, audio plays a part of that, although, I must humbly admit, not perhaps in the way you lot are used to. I'll leave that to later inquiry, if anybody is interested - my main occupation with the frequency spectrum has been at the outer extremes of the audio one.
However...
I joined the forum only recently, because I have finally decided to investigate the one frequency band I have sort of only paid lip service to, sort of
What sparked this? Weeell, (and I hate to say this, Skollie), I finally got around to hauling out an old turntable I snagged after my grandfather died a few years ago, and found out that it was a pretty good one. Since then I've been trolling Teh Interwebz for information and putting together plans for converting my large collection of vinyl to digital format. Along the way I've found that, although I'm damn good at design and construction of pretty much any analog and digital circuitry, I'm a little clueless about what is actually happening out there right now from a user point of view.So I thought I'd drop in and gather opinions, advice, insults, and share the same
To give a little more background: I'm an electronics engineer (B.Sc. and Higher National Diploma), with around 20 year experience in R&D. My main field is RF, I have designed world class stuff in the HF/VHF bands. I have worked with VLF (sonar) for underwater apps, messed with lasers, dabbled with LEDs that will melt your eyes, screwed around with robotics, designed and played with fire sensors, built audio amps and speakers that would make your ears bleed. I'll skip the "leaping tall buildings in a single bound" bit, nobody ever believes that. Until they see it
Audio-wise, I'm pretty much your standard run-of-the-mill consumer currently. I own an iPod, I have herds of mp3s, some FLAC stuff, about 600 LPs, high end sound card in PC, home built 120W amp, about 5 other hand-me-down component amps, 4 sets of mediocre speakers, the best pair currently being couple of Kenwoods since my Mordaunt-Shorts got stolen a while back.
Oh, the turntable! It's a Garrard M301, with an Ortofon RS212 arm, and a few cartridges and accessories. I'm busy designing a decent preamp for it after falling over backwards at the price of preamps on Amazon. No way I'm paying that amount of money for something I can build myself.
So, that's it, in a nutshell. I'd be interested if anybody has advice to share on the turntable and ideal interfacing, especially when it comes to RIAA curves. I have an unobtainable series of 78's which I wish to digitise, for example, and I know that some manufacturers (eg. Decca) had specific RIAA profiles when they cut their discs. Considering degradation when playing vinyl, I want to make sure I have the optimal recording system before diving in to reproduction.
Cheers!
EB
