It all started with Road Runner, our local provider of cable modem access. Akron was one of the first places to have cable modem access to the Web; it's been available here for four years (as of October 2000). Cable access to the Web, in case you don't know, is many times faster than normal phone access. Such speedy connections are known as high bandwidth. We didn't jump in right away; the advantages of high bandwidth weren't compelling compared to the price. We used a single phone line for both Web access and regular communication for years. As the Internet has grown, however, so has our use of it. It finally got to be too much hassle to do both on a single phone line. We could have invested in a dedicated phone line, but throughput via standard phone lines has just become insufficient. I got a promotional offer from Road Runner and I bit.
I'm not going to talk about Road Runner much; in the main, I'm pleased. There are a few gotchas (like security, visit www.zonelabs.com and grc.com to indulge your paranoia) but the speed is great, even when it slows down a lot during primetime. This seems to be about 8:30 - 11 pm weeknights; I'm not sure yet about the weekends. We had several people from the cable company visit as part of the installation process. The friendly software installer was very knowledgeable about computers and he encouraged me to follow through with other upgrades that I had been considering. Until I talked to him, I was on the fence about getting a CD-burner, a slang term for a CD-ROM drive that can write to special CDs. I knew that there have been recent improvements in writeable CD drives that make them tolerant of glitches during the disk burning procedure. Older drives create coasters if a glitch happens. These drives recover. I decided to get one (a Plextor PX-W1210TA, www.plextor.com, if you're curious, purchased from buy.com).
As I checked my system out prior to purchasing the drive, I ran a diagnostic program called Sandra. You can find the website for Sandra at www.3bsoftware.com. Sandra performs very detailed diagnostics of Windows 98 computer systems. Based on its reporting, I decided that if it was going to support a high-speed CD-RW drive, BAR needed more memory. I added 64 megabytes more, to bring it up to 128 Meg. I bought the memory on-line, at www.crucial.com, if you're interested in memory upgrades.
With all this new stuff, I can now do something I've been wanting to do. I can transfer music from vinyl to CD. For years, I've just bought CDs to replace my albums. Actually, I prefer to do this. CDs are usually remastered to take full advantage of that medium's superior capabilities. Any album that I really like is worth the money. Not every album I own has been released in the CD format, however and there have been instances where the CD version of an album is inferior, either by having fewer cuts (usually because a double album was recorded on a single CD), or because of incompetent remastering, combined with distributor greed. One import CD I bought (at import prices) sounded horrible. I got on the web and found out that it had been made from the wrong master tapes. Rather than correct it, the company decided to sell their mistake. Now I can correct the error, by recording a CD from the original album.
If all this interests you, there are lots of sites on the web that discuss the process in detail. One site, Technocopia, at www.technocopia.com, sent me an e-mail recently asking me to consider covering their site in this column. When I visited, I was surprised to find a link on how to transfer music from vinyl to CDs - just what I'd been working on. I plan to cover them in more detail in a future column. There are also sites like Magic Sound Restoration at www.lp2cd.com, that will do the job for you (I haven't used them, though, caveat emptor). In a thumbnail, you need your working turntable, with a well-adjusted stylus in good repair. I had an old Radio Shack pre-amp lying around to boost the turntable's low level signal up to a level that the sound card liked, so I was able to plug the turntable into the pre-amp and the pre-amp into the soundcard. There are other ways to record, some better (and more costly), some worse (like recording to cassette tape first) and some just different (move your computer near your receiver and get an amplified signal from it; way too clumsy for my situation). You'll need a big chunk of free hard disk space; a gigabyte will generally be sufficient. You'll also need some software to do the recording; I use Gold Wave, www.goldwave.com, which I previously mentioned in Brain Candy #14. Another potential option is Cool Edit, which you can find at www.syntrillium.com/cooledit. I haven't used it, but it has many fans.
After recording, a little cleanup is needed. Even my cleanest record so far has needed click and pop filtering, which Gold Wave handles well. I've never had to use more than the minimum setting (5000 %); the default of 1000 % introduced definite artifacts to the music. Some disks really sound great, but others sound muddy. I'm just beginning to experiment with parametric equalization and dynamic range expansion to improve recordings with these kinds of problems. I haven't had to do any noise reduction yet, but Gold Wave and Cool Edit can both handle this function, too.
Anyway, I'm having great fun with all of this. If you have a bunch of old records that you want on CD, with the advent of more stable CD-burners, it's now pretty easy to do, with the right equipment.
CATBAR - Brain Candy #39 - New Capabilities Revisited / Brian Rock / Oct 11 2000