A few months back, my wife’s favorite uncle died and we’ve been helping her aunt clear out the house so that she can move. I’ve been through this before with older relatves, but Uncle John was only ten years older than me, and he had another two or three good deacdes in him. Except that it didn’t work out that way.

Among the things that John had been holding onto was a pretty large record collection. We didn’t quite have to explain to Nephew John, who was helping clear things out, what a record was…but he’d never heard one, either.

Now, one of the thing’s I’d always liked about Uncle John was his taste in music. He’d been into sixties folk same as me, and there were a number of records that I couldn’t just let go to a record store without at least listening too, or better yet, ripping to digital.

Audiophiles are now turning over in their graves, because everyone knows the warmth and liviness of records can’t be caught in digital recordings. Ideally you need a vacuum tube amplifier as well. But I figure that great sounding music may not be as good a tremendous sounding music, but it’s better than a kick in the head.

Today’s reciever/amplifiers often don’t even come with an input that a phono output will work with, because phonographs didn’t come with their own amplifiers for the weak signal that the phono cartridges oputput. You have two choices for getting records into your computer. First, you can buy a USB turntable for between $60 and $200 which solves all your problems at once. Danile Dern, a journalist friend of mine, did a review of that option a while back and I almost borrowed one of his review units from him…but not quite.

[amazon_link id=”B003UPTE4K” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]The other option you have is to buy a free standing phono amplifier and plug it into a turntable, making it compatible with contemporary recievers or computer sound cards. John had kept a perfectly good Dual turntable with the records, though he had no place to plug it in, so all I needed was the preamp. You can spend as much or as little as you want on that, from $12.95 to $300 or more. Me, I spent $12.95 to see how it worked, buying a “Bozak Madisson Phono Preamp” off Amazon. It took three days to arrive, and when I opened it up there was an unsettling rattling noise in it, so I unbent the tabs on the bottom and shook out what turned out to be a glob of hardend glue which wouldn’t have caused any trouble anyway.

Once I had the preamp, hooking the turntable up to my desktop pc was pretty simple. Since the turntable had been built into a cabinet the uncle made for it I had to rig something up, which wound up being for cans of beans, one uncer each of its vibration isolating feet, so that the motor could hang down in the middle. Between the jumble of wires, unmouneted amp and jury rigged base, the whole setup looked pretty frightneing. FrankenPhono. But it worked fine.

I had some software specifically made for recording old vinyl and breaking up the songs into individual tracks, but that sems to have gone away with the last desktop pc. No matter, I don’t care about breaking up the songs anyway. These are albums, with an order and identity to them. Dicing them up into mere songs just doesn’t seem right. I remember many of them, and there’s a certain anticipation that gets thwarted if the next song isn’t the next song.

For recording the songs I chose Adobe Soundbooth from CS4, which I had loaded on the system. I’m not sure I’ve used it before, but it was straightforward, at least after I figured out how to choose the line level input from my realtek sound card and adjust the levels so it didn’t peak the meter. After that it was just a matter of putting on the record, clicking on record, waiting to the end of the side, stopping record, running a slight pop and hiss reduction on it, trimming the ends and saving to an mp3. Simple. Realy.

RIght now I’m listening to the previous album (Kim Karnes – Mistakent Identity) on my media system in the living room while recording the next album, John Prine’s first, which has special meaning to me, on the system in my loft/office.

Life is good.

The Prine album looked to be in nearly perfect shape, but as soon as I started it the needle jumped a track, then did it again. I stopped the turntable, spun it around and examined the surface closely. Sure enough, there was a short, but distinct scratch across the first few grooves.If it had been slight enough so that the needle would still track, there’d be no problem, since I could edit it out as a “pop.” In this case, there was no saving it, but the rest of the track, and record were fine, so I’ll take that as a remider of how fragile records are.

It’s a pity that kids today don’t get to experience that fragility. Digital music is largely indestructable and unchanging. That’s good, in far as it goes. but there are lessons to be learned from things that need to be taken care of but wear out anyway.

How about that, we just got to a track I’d totaly forgotten about. Pretty good too. I wonder what it would sound like with a big tube amp and speakers the size of two drawer file cabinets?