Vinyl collection, now what?

@fuzztone,

Excellent post with some great advice.

"Don’t even get them near a cheap USB table."

Absolutely.

Vinyl has the ability to outlast all digital formats therefore it deserves all the care and good handling you can afford.

Needless to say, it also deserves a cartridge which has excellent tracking properties.

Digitising LPs is not the great sin that some claim it is, but as @fuzztone said, it is quite a specialised job.

Heck, even Michael Fremer has done it.

@cleeds ,

'There's still value sometimes in making a pristine digital copy of some recordings, especially those that are OOP, or those with sonics that really trounce the digital version.'


Absolutely. 

A good case in point was the work of needledrop artists such as the notorious Dr Ebbetts. 

His digitising of the Beatles LP back catalogue played it's own part in getting Apple/EMI to issue their own official reissues.

For many years his bootleg needledrops were considered superior to the official 1987 CD releases. It appeared that digitising analogue LP was far less harmful than digitising analogue masters at source.

I never had issue with such practices, if one man on his own could supply a better sounding product than a multinational conglomerate...

A similar thing had happened back in the early 70s which prompted the release of the Red and Blue albums. But in that case the bootleg doing the rounds previously was of poor quality.

It's clear that the music industry has largely deaf ears as far as audiophiles are concerned but that was one example where they clearly heard the sound of money talking.