Who's Converting LPs to HD files?

Thanks... I've been doing that myself... Most of what's left of these LPs aren't on CD to the best of my knowledge, though I'll have to catalog 'em and make sure.

I apreciate the input however... thanks much.

It will cost you around $10,000. Skip down to the last paragraph for my recommendation and then figure out whether you want to read the rest of the post.

I've been digitizing parts of my vinyl collection on and off for over 5 years and based upon my experience what you're asking is not a trivial task. It takes a lot of time and effort to properly do the task. Think for a second about all the steps that would be involved:

1. safely ship back and forth 300 albums
2. clean the records
3. play and convert to digital format
4. declick the digital files (optional)
5. manually type album name and artist
6. divide album sides into individual songs (optional)
7. manually type song titles (optional)
8. sample rate convert (optional)
9. listen to finish files for quality control

Assuming the person doing this already has the equipment there are still some ancillary costs incurred. Record cleaning fluids and materials, approximately 250 hours of wear on to the phono cartridge and a hard drive for file storage/transfer.

Basically, it comes down to for every minute of vinyl transferred it takes 2.5 minutes of work. Assuming 40 minutes per album that works out to 500 hours to complete the task. At $8/hr (minimum wage) it will cost you $4,000 plus ancillary cost (say $500). That's the absolute bare bones minimum. If you Google "vinyl to digital conversion" you'll find commercial services that will do it for $25 to $40 per album. So realistically you easily could spend $10,000 for this project.

My advice mirrors the above comment about buying used CDs. If that doesn't meet your needs then consider buying a low end phono setup for under $1,000. Such a setup would sound decent and allow you to enjoy you music. If you wanted to take it a step further, you could also buy an A/D converter and recording software and digitize the albums yourself. When finished you could then sell the phono rig and A/D for roughly what you paid. It will take much time and effort, but you will be in complete control of the process and the quality of the transfers.

I take a simpler approach. Get an TerraTec iVinyl preamp here: http://www.terratec.net/en/products/noxon.html

Use the supplied CD Spin Doctor software. Rip to 24bit 96KhZ and save on an external HD. Transfer to iTunes in Apple Lossless format, label the individual songs and get the album artwork.

This takes me about 1 hour per album now that I have it all figured out. Now, I can stream the iTunes copies throughout the house at "CD quality" and I have a copy of the higher resolution file on an external drive that I can access later if I need or want to.

Additionally, I can burn CD's (at CD red book quality from iTunes) and listen to my LP's in the car. Great fun. I'm Happy.

Thanks much... Great insights.

I get it the process is involved.... but I'd think it less problematic and more seamless for those familiar with doing it regularly.

I also appreciate the concerns. Thank you.

What I'm wondering is whether any commercial shop will start doing this en masse. Everybody who has recorded vinyl even on so-so equipment knows how good it can be - better than all but the best-mastered RBCDs. A studio, company, or individual that did a good job of recording popular stuff at 24/96 could sell plenty of copies to make it worthwhile.

Wait a minute - no they couldn't - copyright infringement. Drat.