Digital Transferring

Part 1 – Intro
Part 2 – Home conversion with existing turntable
Part 3 – Using a USB turntable
Part 4 – Have Someone Else Do It

Now that we’ve look at the options for your equipment choice when thinking of transferring your vinyl records, we’re going to look at a different option: Hire a professional to do it for you.

When looking at transferring your vinyl LPs to CD, you not only have to consider the equipment needed to playback your records, but also the time required. Converting your records can be very time consuming as we’ll see in part 5 of this series. First you must playback the record at its normal speed, capturing it into the computer. Next you need to take the time to reduce the background noise and the pops and clicks from the recording. Then you have to split the recording into separate tracks, add meta-data and burn your CD. All together, the whole process for a 40 minute LP could take 1.5 hours.

Before we look the professional services, lets come up with an approximate cost for converting the records yourself.. We’ll start by assuming you go with a middle of the line USB turntable for $180. If you have 50 records you want to transfer, spreading the cost of the turntable out over each record, it costs you $3/record (assuming no maintenance/record cleaning, etc). Not a bad value and you’ll have a hard time finding someone to do it for you for that price. But lets assume our time is actually semi-valuable to us and as a trade-off for doing the record transfer versus spending time with the wife, we have to spend $10/hour to buy her flowers to keep her from  smashing our record collection. If we take on average 1.2 hours/record, our 50 records take us 60 hours. At $10/hour, we’re now at $600, plus the $180 for the turntable gives us a total cost of $780, or $15/record. Still not a bad price. However, if we only have 15 records, then we end up at $24/record (18 hours=$180 + $180 for turntable). You can of course do your own calculations based on what you value your time at, etc.. But as you can see, it can get time consuming and costly.

Now lets look at the costs and considerations of having someone else do the transferring for you. I’ll put in a little self promotion here and use my own company as an example here. Recapture Your Memories charges $20/12″ 33rpm record transfer (different rates for different sizes/speeds). This puts it right around the costs for doing it yourself. So what are the advantages of paying someone else to do your work? Well obviously if you only have 1-10 records to transfer, considering the costs of equipment, the learning curve and your time, its much cheaper to have someone else do it for you. If you have more than 10 records you want transferred, things get less clear when looking at the basic economics.

So if you have more than 10 records to transfer, what are the advantages to hiring a professional? A professional company will (should) have high end equipment, experience and will also have some extra tricks up their sleeves.

Equipment

Professional transfer companies should be using equipment from the high end of the turntable options discussed in parts 2 and 3 of this series. At Recapture Your Memories, we use a Pro-ject Debut III (with Ortofon OM-5e cartridge) turntable along with the Pro-ject USB Phono Box. This gives us a high-quality, true to original copy of your records. We don’t have the issues that come along with plastic parts or low end needles.

Before bringing your irreplaceable records to someone, make sure you find out what quality of equipment they’ll be using to playback your records. Refer to part 3 of this series to find out more about what the different levels of turntable quality means. (It talks mostly about USB turntables, but the same advice applies to analog turntables)

Experience

The trained professionals you take your records to will know their hardware and software in depth. They’ll know the shortcuts and tricks to clean up the final digital recordings of your albums. They’ll know which setting to use and how to adjust them to reduce the noise and pops and clicks from your albums without losing the quality of the music behind the noise.

Tricks

Most professional transferrers will also have additional equipment and tricks the give you a better quality transfer result. Vinyl has a tendency to pick up dirt and dust and fingerprints which all affect the outcome of the digital copy (this is what causes most of the pops and clicks you hear). Most professional transfer companies will use some sort of a cleaning system on your records, whether it is just a basic dust/static removal, a light cleaning, or a full deep cleaning using a record cleaning machine. If you talk to any vinyl loving audiophile, they’ll tell you a clean record is better sounding record. You can hear deeper sounds and sounds which you haven’t heard from your vinyl in years. (We’ll talk more about this in part 6 of the series)

So, depending how many records you have and how much time and money you want to invest into the process and all the extra parts needed to do a similar quality job (cleaners, quality turntable, etc), you may  decide to do the record transfers yourself. However, for the majority of people out there, you’ll probably find that it makes the most sense to have a professional company do the transfers for you.

What do you think? Is it worthwhile for you to do your own transfers? Leave a comment and let me know!

Part 1 – Intro
Part 2 – Home conversion with existing turntable
Part 3 – Using a USB turntable
Part 4 – Have Someone Else Do It