atari2600land's Blog

After doing a bit of Googling it appears you can "cook" your records by warming your oven, placing the record between a couple of sheets of glass and flatten them back out that way. Sounds a bit risky but doable. I ended up buying an ION USB turntable a few years ago and it works great for putting records into the computer -- of course truth be told, once I started looking around I found almost all of my records in mp3 format, so it was mostly an exercise in geekness vs. one of necessity.

The oven deal works ok. Make sure and clean the record first! Low temp, helps if you have something heavy to apply to the record as well. I did this with a 12" single or two with good results.

 

Go to the thrifty and try it on a coupla throwaways before you put the real deal in.

 

A good friend and I have been sharing a rather large vinyl collection. Every few years, we will swap. Currently, he's got it, and that's cool.

 

Personally, I like the vinyl sound. A well mastered 12" single just sounds great!

 

One thing about those USB turntables is the often spotty stylus quality. The best recordings I've done are from a real turntable, pre-amp, into a good sound card. If you've got a 24 bit capable one, those are great! You need the headroom to get the full detail and dynamic range, and allow the pops to happen.

 

BTW: If you've got a pop, that's what the pencil tool in your audio editor is for! Just zoom in and scribble something that looks like it should be there. It works amazingly well as you get most of the original frequencies. This is better than just lopping them off most all of the time.

 

For most tunes, it's just not worth the hassle. For the occasional vinyl only release, or one with good range characteristics, the digital conversion is fun, but time consuming!

I've been going through and digitizing my LPs (ones that no CDs are available for). The best cleaning supplies I've found are from Last Factory. They're pricey, but a small bottle will last pretty-much forever.

 

I'd only try to flatten out a record if I didn't care about it. I'd hate to think about what that would do to the grooves. From what I've read, you need very heavy, thick pieces of glass to make it work. I think it's better just to get another copy. Most records are pretty affordable, especially if you shop around places like Gemm.com.

 

Just make sure when you're capturing audio, you don't set the input level so high that the signal clips. Digital distortion sounds horrible.