Our good friend and loyal customer Cijoy was kind enough to submit this article to help the agiprodj.com family. Thanks Cijoy! You definately did your homework my friend. Enjoy and happy ripping all.

The ABC’s of archiving vinyl

Use a quality turntable with a S-Shaped tonearm.
The Technics 1200 line is a good choice. See this site for more reasons why.

Clean your vinyl
Gruv Glide, Discwasher, etc. Whatever you like.

Pick a Hi-Fidelity cartridge and needle
Chose a cartridge that has accurate playback. I chose the Shure M97xE. I trust Shure they have engineers that give you the kind of support that Rane does.This cartridge has solids reviews and is in my opinion a good balance between price/performance. I bought mine from www.kabusa.com for under $90.
Click for more information.

Mount and connect your cartrdige
Use DeoxIT to clean the contacts on your cartidge and your headshell. Clean both the interface to the cartridge and the interface to the tonearm. Clean your RCA cables and every other electrical connection while you are at it.

Adjust overhang of your cartridge
Use an overhang guide to get the position correct. The tool that comes with a Technics 1200 works properly when used as advised by www.kabusa.com
You can buy one for $1.50 from this site if you don’t have it available.
I read on audiogon forums that the Technics supplied tool does the job well enough for ‘audiophile’ (gear lover) types to be happy.

Align your cartridge
The Shure M97xE cartridge includes an alignment protractor. Or you can print one and learn more about the topic from this site.
(printable 2 point protractor)

Adjust the height of the tonearm
Make the tonearm with mounted cartridge level with the table.

Adjust the tracking force and the anti-skate
Use the values the cartridge manufacturer specify.
Tracking force = anti-skate for these applications.
The Technics counterweight is accurate enough or else get a stylus force gauge. Best price on the Shure one is from kabusa.com
Please read the Book of Shure on how to ‘zero’ the tonearm

Level your turntable
Use a bubble level that you mount on the spindle for this task.
Kabusa.com sells a record clamp that includes the level.

Mount your turntable on a sturdy wall mounted shelf
The shelf is more isolated from vibration than a table. Don’t use an ironing board.


Get a record clamp
This will ‘flatten’ the vinyl to help in tracking.
kabusa.com has one with the fluid level. I have one and it works as advertised.

Get a thick rubber mat. Slipmats are out of place here.
If you have a Technics 1200/1210 MK5 order the ‘thick’ rubber mat.
The 1200/1210 had the thick rubber mats but the MK5 comes with a thin one that throws off the height alignment. I don’t know about the M3D.

Got a dustcover?
This helps reduce external vibrations from reaching your tonearm during playback.

Monitor with headphones or in silence using a software scope.
This will prevent your speakers from feeding back into the cartridge/tonearm.

Get a good Phono Pre-Amp that has an accurate RIAA equalization curve.
The Rane PS-1 would be great but they are discontinued and it would take about 100 orders to get Rane to think about resurrecting it. Maybe we can try.
:-)
If you have a Rane mixer you are probably doing pretty well on this area. I don’t know about the other mixers as I have not spoken with their engineers or read their manuals.

Optional: Get a Test Record (HI FI NEWS HFN-002) to test your cartridge alignment and really get deep into understanding your signal path.

Analog to Digital Conversion
At this point you are going to want to invest in a real audio card or a Rane MP4 or TTM 57SL. note the MP4 has 24 bit recording while the TTM57SL has 16 bit recording. It’s the end users call on how much data they want to capture at a time when recording their vinyl. I think this is a personal thing as some people can ‘hear’ a difference and others can’t.
If you are going to use an internal sound card. The ESI Juli@ card has what has been benchmarked as a very good Analog to Digital converter. It is also reasonably priced.This works on both Windows and Mac with a PCI slot. This card has balanced inputs which is preferred over unbalanced for all the standard reasons.

Software recording
This is a matter of personal preference. There are many applications that can record the digitized audio stream to a file format. I would suggest you record into an uncompressed form in whatever bit level/sampling ratio you prefer. I will comment that CD Audio at 16 bit/44.1kHz was specified by Redbook in 1980
While DVD-Audio has a max of 24-bit/192 kHz stereo audio track.
These are PCM encoding techniques.

Audio restoration: pop/click removal, compression (to align volume with CD), other audio editing.
This is personal preference. There are many pop/click removal apps and even additional hardware that can do this. Some people like the pop/clicks for the ‘vinyl’ feel some don’t. Compression, some people compress lightly to give it that loudness of a CD. Some audio engineers think record companies have overdone compression and created loudness wars. Any other editing you want to do is up to you and your preference of software.

Thanks and a big shout out to our Cijoy for sharing! Keep your eyes peeled for this kat; looks like we have our first correspondent