Ripping LPs to Hard Drive

What is your cartridge and phono preamp?

@ Zd542

I'm using an old Audio Technica phono cartridge that I've had for 20 years. I'm not using a phono preamp per se, I just have my old Techniques turntable connected to the phono inputs of a Yamaha integrated amp, and the output is coming from the tape out, line level outputs to my Xonar D1 sound card.

If you can hear music and its not all distorted you do have a phono preamp somewhere (I'm sure you know this already). This probably isn't it, but I know some Technics TT's have their own built in phono preamp. If yours has one, connecting it to the phono input on your amp would not be a good idea. Then you would be using 2 phono preamps. If your not at all sure, just connect your TT to a different input and see what happens. You can't do any damage by trying this. Actually, if your TT does have its own pre, connect it directly to your sound card.

Beyond that, you may want to have a look at your software settings. Check your global gain settings for whatever OS you are working with. I make that mistake myself all the time. One last thing you may want to try is to connect your TT directly to the sound card even if you don't have a built in phono stage. Your cart is almost certainly a high output MM. I'm pretty sure you can find a RIAA EQ curve plug in for Audacity. If you can get that EQ curve, your sound card may have enough gain to make it work. Understand, though, this is just a guess on my part. I've never done this but I know your sound card is very good and may have enough clean gain to do the job.

@ Zd542

Thank you sir. I'll give your suggestions a try.

Also - check the back of the Yammi for a switch that would change the level of the phono inputs. Some amps allow you to set the phono inputs to hi-level so you can use them as another auxiliary input if you are not using a turntable.

As a worst-case scenario, just record the signal as is and amplify it later with the Audacity built-in function. This might not be adviseable for such a weak signal (-24 dB), but I'm guessing that you will be able to find a way to at least get to around -10 dB by using some of the above suggestions.
Good luck

Danoroo, you got a lot of homework to do. I suggest you read everything on the subject you can find here on past conversations about the same subject.

Or, you can do what I did. Give up on computers and buy a stand-alone CD recorder. This might not fix your level issues, though. It sure fixed my computer issues. I use a Marantz pro-sumer recorder with pretty respectable results.

http://www.lynxstudio.com/product_detail.asp?i=59