Setting Up Your Source

Our input device is a Pioneer front loading stereo turntable with a middle-of-the-road cartridge and a diamond stylus. Our sound card is a Plug and Play Sound Blaster 16. In our case, the headphone output from the turntable is connected to a stereo mixing console and graphics equalizer but we have them turned off for this demonstration just to show you that you can get excellent results plugged directly into the sound card.

Before you actually begin recording you may want to read  this excerpt of  circular 22 from the  US Copyright Office entitled " How to investigate the copyright status of a work". If you have some old recordings that you hate to see vanish with time, we offer no opinions and you must draw your own conclusions.

The record we're going to use for this example is "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Fred Waring and The Pennsylvanians. It is recorded on the Decca label in the early 1950's when LP's were first introduced. This record was a replacement for a 78 RPM that had been in my family since the late 1930's and has been handled by four generations of children who played it on many steel needle record players. The album cover is held together with duct tape. There couldn't be a worse source on the planet.

Cover by Norman Rockwell.

We recorded from the record using PCM compression at 22.050 kHz in 16 bit monaural. The below image is the first 20 seconds of the recording.

In case you'd like to hear it, here's the first twenty seconds of the raw recording. It actually sounds better than we expected. Probably because the record was made when records were still coated with shellac.  Vinyl would never have held up like that.

The abrupt vertical lines are scratches on the record.

To see them better the vertical zoom has been reduce to 25%.

We can either apply a filter to the entire clip or we can manually delete the pops and clicks but for this tutorial we'll do both.

As you can see from the above image, we have zoomed in very close. The highlighted, selected area is a pop.

Now the pop is gone.

We can undo the delete now and try it again using a filter.

Here's the same twenty seconds after the filter has been applied.

This is 'Twas the Night Before Christmas edited and converted to Windows Media. Because we sacrificed some of the amplitude in the process of removing the pops and cracks, we punched it back up in the conversion. This was a bad idea and the final recording has a ghost in it. If this was a production job it would have to be redone but we're leaving it like this so you can try to improve it.

If you would like to hear more of Fred Waring's music, visit the Fred Waring's America site at Penn State University.