23-Jun-2016, 12:32
Thanks for that, and welcome.
I worked for Garrard in the 1970s so have quite a bit of experience and knowledge about LPs and have been an amateur recordist for 50+ years.
You said you were interested in recording curves. For collectors of very old microgroove records Devialet's provision of multiple equalisation curves is a boon, but only of use on oldest recordings, most LPs have been cut using the RIAA curve.
The only difference between the 1953 and 1976 curves is the incorporation of a high pass filter in the 1976 version.
All output from a record player below about the natural frequency of the arm/cartridge effective mass on the cartridge compliance (the exact frequency depends on the cartridge damping) is either inaccurate or rubbish. It is best removed since it moves speakers out of their linear area and adds some doppler distortion. I always use the 1976 curve. The correction curve is the same for both cutting the LP, the only difference is the improved playback from the 1976 curve.
Myself I always make recordings whilst playing back the LP at normal listening levels in my listening room.
The reason for this is that I am sure part of the characteristic sound of LPs includes the low level reverb added by the replay system picking up airborne and structure borne vibrations in the listening room and adding it to the music.
A little anecdote to explain how I discovered this.
One of the first jobs they gave me at the Garrard R&D dept when I joined as a young engineer was to measure the rumble on a test turntable. They gave me a B&K Analyser and silent groove test record to do this. I was frustratingly unable to get consistent results. Of course they knew this would be the case, it was a lesson. They pointed out to me despite the TT being on the oak bench of the R&D lab on the 4th floor of a building with a large car-park between it and the road every bus going by produced a cartridge output as big or more than the rumble.
Then they showed me the isolation table used for measurements, which was a suspended heavy concrete block tuned to around 5Hz. With the TT on this I got consistent results!
About 5 years later I bought a new house which allowed me to put my hifi in the adjoining room to that containing the speakers. I had been keen to do this ever since that day at Garrard. Well, the sound was flatter and less interesting than with the TT in the listening room
I also record at 192/24 but after any necessary manipulation usually keep a 48/16 file. An LP has a dynamic range of 11-12 bits so more than 16 bit is pointless waste of storage. 48 is a simple multiple of 192 so any re-sampler should do a perfect job, whereas converting a file from 192/24 to 44.1/16 is much more risky. With a very good quality conversion I can't hear any difference between the converted file and the original, but some conversion software gives audible degradation in computing the 44.1/16 version.
I worked for Garrard in the 1970s so have quite a bit of experience and knowledge about LPs and have been an amateur recordist for 50+ years.
You said you were interested in recording curves. For collectors of very old microgroove records Devialet's provision of multiple equalisation curves is a boon, but only of use on oldest recordings, most LPs have been cut using the RIAA curve.
The only difference between the 1953 and 1976 curves is the incorporation of a high pass filter in the 1976 version.
All output from a record player below about the natural frequency of the arm/cartridge effective mass on the cartridge compliance (the exact frequency depends on the cartridge damping) is either inaccurate or rubbish. It is best removed since it moves speakers out of their linear area and adds some doppler distortion. I always use the 1976 curve. The correction curve is the same for both cutting the LP, the only difference is the improved playback from the 1976 curve.
Myself I always make recordings whilst playing back the LP at normal listening levels in my listening room.
The reason for this is that I am sure part of the characteristic sound of LPs includes the low level reverb added by the replay system picking up airborne and structure borne vibrations in the listening room and adding it to the music.
A little anecdote to explain how I discovered this.
One of the first jobs they gave me at the Garrard R&D dept when I joined as a young engineer was to measure the rumble on a test turntable. They gave me a B&K Analyser and silent groove test record to do this. I was frustratingly unable to get consistent results. Of course they knew this would be the case, it was a lesson. They pointed out to me despite the TT being on the oak bench of the R&D lab on the 4th floor of a building with a large car-park between it and the road every bus going by produced a cartridge output as big or more than the rumble.
Then they showed me the isolation table used for measurements, which was a suspended heavy concrete block tuned to around 5Hz. With the TT on this I got consistent results!
About 5 years later I bought a new house which allowed me to put my hifi in the adjoining room to that containing the speakers. I had been keen to do this ever since that day at Garrard. Well, the sound was flatter and less interesting than with the TT in the listening room
I also record at 192/24 but after any necessary manipulation usually keep a 48/16 file. An LP has a dynamic range of 11-12 bits so more than 16 bit is pointless waste of storage. 48 is a simple multiple of 192 so any re-sampler should do a perfect job, whereas converting a file from 192/24 to 44.1/16 is much more risky. With a very good quality conversion I can't hear any difference between the converted file and the original, but some conversion software gives audible degradation in computing the 44.1/16 version.
Devialet Original d'Atelier 44 Core, Job Pre/225, Goldmund PH2, Goldmund Reference/T3f /Ortofon A90, Goldmund Mimesis 36+ & Chord Blu, iMac/Air, Lynx Theta, Tune Audio Anima, Goldmund Epilog 1&2, REL Studio. Dialog, Silver Phantoms, Branch stands, copper cables (mainly).
Oxfordshire
