meower wrote: 
No I haven't, at least that I remember.  Have to look it up.  Funny, the CD I have of Quadrophenia is from the soundtrack and the LP seems to be put together differently.  I'll go and find the CD and play them against each other just to be sure.

I thought Layla was yer favorite ...   I just happen to be working on both of these albums right now ... Layla just got finished this very morning (waked and baked to), got another day or so for Quadro.

 kurtster wrote: 
May very well be one of my favorite albums of all time. Have you seen the movie?

 kurtster wrote: 
I haven't listened to it all the way thru, ever. Might finally give it a go.
 
————

Nothing to do with ripping vinyl but our digital collection had gotten really fragmented so I bought a 5TB drive over a year ago, and planned to consolidate everything there... finally got around to it a couple of weeks ago. A dreadful chore, but as I was copying and deleting duplicates and reimporting etc., you know how the computer flashes filenames as it's copying, I was looking at titles and could have sworn I saw "Love Lies Bleeding" which made me go "hmm," because I don't remember having any Elton John. So when it was all done I went and looked and sure enough, we have Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Don't Shoot Me..., Madman, Honky Chateau... don't know where they came from! We put the library on shuffle a lot and have never heard them play, so they must've gotten downloaded and never brought into iTunes. Come to think of it, I might have grabbed them in one of those $5 deals Amazon runs sometimes. Now I have to go browse around and see what else we've re-discovered...
 ——————

The "learning curve" post was interesting. Better you than me, tho.

So I'm working on Quadrophenia right now.  Been years decades since I've listened to it.   Never really listened to it as a body of work cuz I was pretty burned out with rock operas after Tommy.   Just listened to the singles pulled from it, but jeez what an album when taken all at once.  Prescient, dark stuff.  Kinda makes The Wall feel like Part 2 of Quadrophenia with drugs added.  Wonder if Pete and Roger were neighbors growing up ...

The learning curve never stops, after 50 some years of playing records.  All those years I've had only one turntable at a time and basically one cartridge at a time and only two different kinds, but both Audio Technica and both Shibata styluses.  You get used to a certain sound or notion of what its supposed to sound like.  The turntable just held the carts with little adjustments available.  Different carts sounded differently.  This is basic knowledge, but as anyone who did DJing would know that different carts on the same turntable need things like height adjustments to dial in the cart.  I've never had a turntable with a height adjustment before.  Now I do.

I always figured that the goal was to have the tonearm level with the record surface to get the best sound.  Level was where the cart angle was designed to work best by default.  So you try shims or different thickness mats to get you there.  Or you take what you have with the way the turntable presented itself as made.  And there you stay.  That is the sound that you get used to.

Every time I made a tweak to the turntable, it kept getting noticeably better.  These are tweaks that you do just besides getting the overhang right and making sure that the cart is straight on the headshell.  The first one was to get a headshell that rotated so that you could get the stylus perpendicular or square to the vinyl or azimuth.  Without this your stuck in case for some reason the headshell socket in the tonearm is not set perfectly.  Distortion and channel imbalance is part of what happens when this is wrong.  Turns out that mine is not set like it should be.  So when it was all done another noticeable improvement was achieved.

The last tweak (I thought) was to dampen the tonearm to kill any resonant frequencies it made that would be induced into the sound chain as it interacts with the cart.  This is an extension of removing the dust cover for critical listening and ripping.  Tonearm resonance has long been a problem that included matching carts to certain turntable tonearm harmonic combinations.  I read about that some but I don't have the resources to buy different carts.  I read about people having foam blown into tonearms during rewiring, shrinkwrap over the length of the tonearm and stumbled onto Herbie's Audio and found his removable and adjustable tonearm clamp / dampeners that I mentioned earlier below.  At $15, cheap enough for a crap shoot.  

The improvement was the most profound tweak I've yet to do.  Until this, all the tweaks and adjustments made the sound better overall and was acceptable all things considered.  But this one changed everything.  All of a sudden things got brighter, sharper and clearer.  It was profound enough to decide to start ripping all over again.  But it was a little too bright.  I found that I could overcome it with remastering, but the more I got into the ripping I felt that something was wrong, but I didn't know what it was or how to fix it.  Because of someone over at Discogs asking about a problem they were having with their TT and distortion it caused me to do some digging and found this bit about the VTA or tonearm height adjustment.  Its the same place that has that $110k turntable.  Of all the reading over my lifetime pouring through all kinds of audio mags, including 10 years of Audiophile back in the 90's, no one ever mentioned the importance of the VTA to the overall sound.  It was just plain dumb luck that I stumbled on to this information at a critical time.

Lloyd Walker on Fine Tuning Your Turntable

So after some consideration, I figured this was something to try because it dealt with the new sound I was getting from the same equipment.  Evidently with the cart and turntable I have, the more I dial it in, the more critical this one adjustment gets.  What I read about the height adjustment seemed to explain what I was now hearing.  

So to bring it all home, vinyl is pure analogue and getting the most out of it requires treating each individual record, even the same title pressed several years apart, as a separate channel like in the old days of TV and rabbit ears.  Different people mastered different pressings and vinyl mixtures and thicknesses have changed over the years.  You go from paper thin Dynaflex to massive 200 gram pressings that can change the height by up to 2mm, which in the scheme of things is huge when the tracking angle has a couple of degrees of tolerance.

When I bought my present turntable as my forever one, I did not even take the height adjustment feature into consideration.  I got it because of its specs and it was built like a tank and would last longer than me given its history.  I'm now completely dialed in and using it to its full capabilities and realize how lucky I got.  That and going after the cart that had the sound that I wanted.  Being a broke audiophile, I went after the best way to play the stuff over the reproduction side finding the better the source sounded, the better everything else sounded.  A Macintosh receiver can't make a shitty turntable set up sound better than it actually is.  Nothing can.  Not all the equalizers and room tunes and what not.  Tuning the vinyl can though.  You can't tune a CD, just like you can't tune a fish, but you can tune a piano. 

  y'all

and Zerostats really work ...

Sorry there is nothing that I can do with this.  Its been processed to death already.  Anything that I would do to it would only make it worse.

I would need the source of this before processing to be able to do anything good with it.  Not knowing what they started with, this may be pretty darn good from what there was to work with in the beginning.

Got it.  We'll see what happens.

A famous old song that could use your treatment.

Still love my new preamp, its working perfectly.

Just added the last two turntable tweaks and I'm done.  I have known about record weights and turntable clamps for a long time and never really gave them much thought.  They seemed pretty expensive for something simple and what was the return in sound ?  The other thing I've known about but never really could find a simple answer to was the resonant vibrations in the tone arm which can be very profound.  

SFW got my attention to this part of the noise chain when he mentioned the nasty affect the dust cover has when it is attached during playback.  It was a big duh, just never really mattered until I got this far.  The tone arm is also susceptible to weirdness and unwanted vibrations.

So I stumbled onto this website and found the Hal O Jr titanium tone arm damping clamp and a medium weight aluminum record weight (its listed under the uber expensive titanium one) for what is essentially peanuts.  The difference was immediate and overwhelming.  They should help out any turntable and make a noticeable improvement for little risk.  The damper is removable, adjustable and returnable if it doesn't help.  Hard to lose on trying it out.  Herbie is a one man show evidently and has been doing this for a long time and has racked up some impressive kudos along the way.

That's it for now.  Have a Happy 4th everybody !!

The reimage of the music puter is done and the new USB interface is working well.  Very well.  If it keeps functioning as it is out of the box, I'll give it two thumbs up right now.  It works well with Audio Technica MM carts.  The input impedance matches up very well for carts with lower impendances like the AT's.  Took several months of studying and hands on comparing of other devices to make this the final choice.  It replaces my trusty old ART that just plain wore out after ten years.  The new ART didn't do it.  Tried two of them.  Sending one back and keeping the other just to have a back up on the shelf.

My copies of Sgt Pepper and All Things Must Pass arrived last week.  Virgin vinyl ... 

So after a couple of shakedown rips I'll be slicing the shrink wrap and going for it.

Gonna be anal and rip once right out of sleeve and then do my standard cleaning and archival ripping to compare the sonic differences, if any.  I would be really surprised if there is none.

Hey, its keeping me off the streets ... and occupied.  

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
I hope so.  Actually bit the bullet this week and pulled the trigger on starting to part with some of my collection.  Nothing precious yet but some nuggets that I was satisfied with my rips and was willing to let go to see what it would feel like.  Its weird.  You spend 50 years of dragging them around, taking extreme measures to protect them and still try to enjoy them.  Now its the time you never expected to reach where its time to let go.  Bittersweet, very ...

 kurtster wrote: 
Good to hear...    
That "In the Cellar" recording that cleaned up is pretty catchy.  

 Skydog wrote: 
I thought it was funny actually.  

Poor sentence structure on my part.  
'it' referred to the song not heroin.    

 kurtster wrote: 
I was confused by this ,.........

  kurtster wrote:  

 rhahl wrote: 
Yeah.  Tried it a couple of different ways.  There was a background noise that sounded like a diesel idling outside the room or something.  The guitar amp was obviously too loud.  Shoulda played it unamped, coulda had a chance for a nice moment there.  That's the way it goes.

And skydog, no heroin for me.  One of the few things I never tried along the way through life.  Prolly woulda liked it and we all know how those things end up.  There were other things though ... 

 

 kurtster wrote: 
That is interesting. Her voice is more distinct but not as warm. Thanks for giving it a try.

Ok sports fans, I got as far as I think I can take this thing without screwing it up too much.  Reminds me of Clapton's Mainline Florida track from 461 Ocean Blvd where his vocals are so lost in the guitars.  Heroin does funny things to people ...  I've tried it over and over again through the years.  Now I'm gonna have to dig it up and try one more time.

Anyway, I just got a call from a co worker that her daughter's water broke and she's off to Virginny in the AM to be a grandma again and I have to go in and cover for her the next three days.  So I'm done with this for the evening.  Let me know how I did with this.

Same old  CLICKY



Oh and I see that someone went into the mixtape folder and tried to download.  I turned that function back on.  So get em while you can if you want em.  They'll be gone by the weekend.

 rhahl wrote: 
Hard to say.  Though I might be able to bring up the vocal which would accomplish the same thing I think you are asking for.  Without the pre mix individual tracks, I can't do something like that the way you suggest.  It appears that was recorded on someone's camcorder so there is no real mix per se to work with.  I can take a crack at it for S&G's but I might make it worse.  

I went and found the 'official' vid for this song.  I sure could very easily get rid of the annoying clicks that run through it.  Don't know if they appear on the CD version.  The INXS song Disappear has some similar clicks that showed up on the rip and from several different sources. 

Here's the official version.  Do you hear the clicks ?  If you're familiar with the song, are they intentional ?   Cuz you never know.

 

 rhahl wrote: 
good question, that guitar is to loud