I did a lot of tries with several combinations. The final satisfactory system is as follows:
- A good turntable with an accurate pitch control if you want to have a duration consistent with the one announced of the LP. Mine is a quartz controlled Hitachi HT-800 (motor only). There is a HT-840 with a plinth and tonearm. Very rare now.
- A cartridge having good specs. Your recording cannot be better than the source. Mine is Benz Micro ACE SL for stereo and Audio-Technica AT-MONO3/ LP for the Mono (my turntable has three arms). This latter must have a load of 100 ohms to prevent harsh sound on DECCA ffrr recordings.
- A good phono pre-ampwith RIAA. Mine is Ray Samuels F117 phono stage. A REAL KILLER better than higly priced phono amps.
- The front end for AD Conversion is the Apogee Duet 2. There is a flaw in this hardware that have a very good sound in the A/D stage; however I have a turn around (If you are interested let me know). If you have more money the Benchmark ADC1 is a very good option.
- The software to capture the flow: IZOTOPE RX5. This software is the top to do the job of declick, denoise, de-hum, de-hiss and more. The Standard edition is OK. The Advanced edition is not required for the job. This software allows also to cut the recording in tracks. The Batch Processing function which allows to concatenate several processing tasks saves a lot of time because you can run these overnight. The declick process is OUTSTANDING; never saw something so performant.
- A good turntable with an accurate pitch control if you want to have a duration consistent with the one announced of the LP. Mine is a quartz controlled Hitachi HT-800 (motor only). There is a HT-840 with a plinth and tonearm. Very rare now.
- A cartridge having good specs. Your recording cannot be better than the source. Mine is Benz Micro ACE SL for stereo and Audio-Technica AT-MONO3/ LP for the Mono (my turntable has three arms). This latter must have a load of 100 ohms to prevent harsh sound on DECCA ffrr recordings.
- A good phono pre-ampwith RIAA. Mine is Ray Samuels F117 phono stage. A REAL KILLER better than higly priced phono amps.
- The front end for AD Conversion is the Apogee Duet 2. There is a flaw in this hardware that have a very good sound in the A/D stage; however I have a turn around (If you are interested let me know). If you have more money the Benchmark ADC1 is a very good option.
- The software to capture the flow: IZOTOPE RX5. This software is the top to do the job of declick, denoise, de-hum, de-hiss and more. The Standard edition is OK. The Advanced edition is not required for the job. This software allows also to cut the recording in tracks. The Batch Processing function which allows to concatenate several processing tasks saves a lot of time because you can run these overnight. The declick process is OUTSTANDING; never saw something so performant.