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  Friday  November 21  2003    12: 10 PM

music

One of the things that has been keeping me busy this past week is one of those projects where, once you start, it's best to finish. I have been having a CD crisis. I used to belong to Emusic, until they changed their pricing policies and I downloaded all that I could until they cancelled my membership. I've been burning these albums to music CDs. Piles and piles of music CDs. I finally stopped and organized all my music CDs. I built a bunch of trays, out of cardboard and duct tape, to hold and organize all my music CDs. It's done and now I can start burning the close to 600 albums I downloaded from Emusic over the past year.

And then there are the LPs. You know — those big black CDs. I have about 600 of those and have been getting ready to rip my LPs into CDs. I'm almost there. I think I'm a only a new cartridge away from that project.

I did rip my first LP.

It came out pretty good but there is a 60 cycle hum and some breaking up that is probably due to a poorly aligned 25 year old cartridge. I'm not a rabid audiophile but I do want the best sound I can get without breaking the bank. (And it's a small bank.)

Here is what I'm using to rip the LPs. The turntable is a belt drive Connoisseur BD2A from the 70s. (It's on loan from my friend Bill Feeley.) I put on a new belt from LP Gear. Needle Doctor is another great resource for turntables and turntable paraphenalia. I bought an Orbitrac 2 record cleaning system, a Discwasher stylus cleaning system and replacement fluid for my old Discwasher record cleaner. Clean records are good records. Bags Unlimited is a good source for archival bags to protect those nicely cleaned records. I'm using Nero 6 Ultra Edition to record the LPs. It has a very nice wave editor with declicking and decrackling filters. It also has a noise reduction filter. And Nero 6 is great burning software. Now, all I need is a new cartridge and a phono cartridge alignment tool from Turntable Basics. Rip on!