[LAU] how to record Gramophone?

Steve Fosdick lists at pelvoux.nildram.co.uk
Fri Apr 10 06:10:06 EDT 2009


On Fri, 2009-04-10 at 11:09 +0200, Grammostola Rosea wrote:

> Is it preferable to use the amp of the turntable or use an preamp like 
> the m-audio DMP 3?

If you don't use the built-in pre-amp in the turn table (or if you use a
turntable that does not have one) you will need to be sure the pre-amp
input has the correct impedance for the cartridge in the turntable.  If
you get this wrong you could have little signal or significant
colouration.

At some point in the chain you will need EQ to balance whatever was
applied during mastering.  For modern records this is the RIAA curve and
is usually built in to turntable-specific pre-amps.  These days it would
be possible to do it in software and this may be the better approach if
you are interested in really old recordings which use some non-RIAA
curve.  Either way you'd want to know if the pre-amp includes the RIAA
curve or not.

> And how do you manage capture in ALSA, Ubuntu 9.04? I've no input signal 
> on my dads pc yet

Much depends on which soundcard you are using.

For consumer cards the GNOME volume control applet normally allows most
things to be adjusted but not all available controls are visible by
default.  If you can't get what you want with the visible controls try
Edit/Preferences where you can chose which controls are visible.

ALSA normally starts with everything muted though once you've set the
controls hopefully they are remembered.

For pro cards there is sometimes a separate program required to load
firmware, configure the card and set it's mixer settings.  For example
the RME HDSP family have hdspload, hdspconf and hdspmixer.

Hopefully this helps, if not it would be useful to know the
hardware/software combination you have settled on so people can offer
more specific advice.

Steve.




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