vinyl to hard drive

not very, run a line to your computer and plug it in the line in jack, open up a program to record from the line in jack, and then just play the record.

To record an LP onto a computer will require a phono-stage circuit with RIAA equalization. Going directly from the cartridge to the soundcard will not produce a correct signal. Either use a stereo receiver with a phono circuit, or the phono stage premplifier described further down the page.

This isn't from any particular reader, but rather a composite of dozens and dozens of e-mails I've been getting lately. This type of letter has become so common that it may even surpass requests for cartridge-turntable matches, which still happen almost daily, despite my pleas in Dude, Where's My Cartridge? Of course, the red flag in the above statement, if you haven't noticed yet, is "auxiliary jack." You cannot plug a turntable into just any pair of jacks on the back of your receiver or preamp. As I've mentioned before, signals from a phonograph (there's a term I haven't used before) have to be equalized in order to sound right. This equalization, called RIAA equalization, is inserted during the recording process, and has to be decoded by your receiver or preamp. In the old days, before the advent of the little silver discs, this was a no-brainer, because every receiver and preamp had a position on the selector knob marked "phono." That was your phono preamp, just a printed circuit board or similar doo-dad stuffed somewhere deep within the viscera of your amp. You never saw it, you never thought about it, and things were great.

This all changed when CD's came along, and everyone started selling off their albums and their turntables and their souls. Manufacturers started realizing that not everyone wanted a phono section anymore, and that they could save money by simply excluding it. That's when I first heard the term "line stage" and "line preamplifier," which pretty much meant a preamp without a phono stage. Line preamps started becoming more and more popular, and "full-function" preamps became increasingly scarce. Some people hastily bought line stages, thinking that it was okay since they didn't really listen to LP's much anymore. Then the Vinyl Renaissance came along, and these people felt left out. That's when the market for outboard phono preamps really began to take off.