Digitazing vinyl classics
18 May 2014 Filed in: Personal
My record collection has finally come home after being in storage for ten years,

of course also the turntable arrived home (a vintage Akai AP-006) and everything is in perfect shape.

I had prepared myself to this glorious moment getting a Monacor RIAA preamplifier in order to connect the phono output to any modern device such as a computer audio interface.
But connecting directly the outputs of the RIAA preamp to the inputs of my audio interface would be too “banal” for a geek like me, so I devised a far more complex but way more versatile set of connections.
This system involves the audio patchbay you see on the picture above (a Samson S-patch plus). Patchbays are awesome!
The outputs of the RIAA preamp are connected to the top rear jacks 1 and 2 and the lower rear jacks 25 and 26 to the inputs of my audio interface. These two channels are set in “half-normalled” mode so that “when you insert a jack into the top front jack you DO NOT “break the normal”, so the signal is sent out of the top jack and is still connected to the bottom rear jack. This allows you to split the signal without interrupting the direct connection to the bottom rear jack.”
As you can see on the picture above, there are two patch cables connecting top front jacks 1 and 2 to lower front jacks 27 and 28 because there is another gadget involved in my intricate way of setting things (whose inputs are connected to the lower rear jacks 27 and 28), a Reloop Tape, a very nice little device that makes “digitazing vinyl classics a breeze” and I have plenty of them!
So, thanks to the audio patchbay I can split the phono signal sending it to both the audio interface and the duplicating device (that does not need a computer to operate). An amazingly efficient setup (and I could also patch things in different ways, such as using the Reloop Tape to record stuff straight to mp3 without using the computer).
In order to preserve the same listening experience of LPs I am digitazing them as long files, one for each side.
Passing through the computer I can edit the digitized file but going the other way around makes the process much faster and for listening to LPs in mp3 format on my cell phone is more than enough!