Shoot, now I'm gettin' nostalgic for my very 1st record player: a red, plastic, "close n'play" ...

Soundhound, wouldn't it be just perfect if you could retrofit that with a digital converter??

That will have to wait. I'm networking it to my house so it will wind itself up and be ready by the time I get home

Folks,

To reply to the original posting ...

The NAD PP-1 phono pre-amp should do the trick. It goes for $60 - $100 on ebay.

However if you want to step up in quality, and down in price, try snagging a used NAD stereo pre-amp like the model 1130. Its phono pre-amp stage sounds better than the PP-1 (to my ears anyhow) and judging by the info I could dredge up on it, its specs are about as good as you can get without busting the bank. And the neat thing is that you can find 1130s going for as low as $40 on ebay.

In fact instead of any stand-alone phono pre-amp, you could find any number of what were once high-end phono input-equipped stereo pre-amps available used for a very small fraction of their original selling price. And you never know when having an extra input or two might come in handy.

Hope this helps.

Jeff

ps. Another vinyl / turntable trick: in days of old (ie. pre-CD) we learned lots of lessons about how to get the most out of our turntables / phono cartridges / records. One of the most important lessons I re-learned a couple of months ago was when I re-connected my turntable to my system and placed it on my new equipment shelving. When I knocked on the shelves with a record playing, I could hear the knocking sound coming from my speakers. If vibrations due to this rapping could get through the shelving to the turntable and hence to to stylus, then obviously accoustic feedback could be a problem at high levels as well. To prevent the possibility I went to a local granite kitchen counter supplier and for $40 had him cut and pollish two 3/4 inch thick slabs from cast off material (sink holes) that fit perfectly under the turntable. Separate the two slabs with a layer of rubber and you've created a textbook accoustic dampening arrangement. Knuckles rapping on shelves can no longer be heard and I'm confident that no acoustic feedback can occur either.

Two problems with the NAD phono preamp: the cables are too short, and they are integrated into the unit so you can't even swap for them for longer/better ones.

Thanks to everyone who has replied to my original question. I now have some good ideas as to what phono preamp to look out for.

Your ideas, Jeff, about isolation are interesting -- however, I've never had a problem with sound being transfered through my stand to the stylus. You can punch the stand and not really hear anything. Not bad. But if you hit the turntable itself, well, any table will pick up noise at that point. I had heard of a few other DIY fix-its, including cutting racquetballs in half and place them under the rubber nubs under the platter. Since I've never needed to address that kind of a problem, I haven't tried that trick.

On the other hand, I do pick up directional electric noise. As the tone-arm angle shifts during play, an audible hum enters into the sound. I know it isn't a loose ground wire; it is the proximity to my TV set. I may eventually play with the placement of the equipment in my room maximizing the distance of the turntable away from the TV.

i haven't had time or energy to read all of these comments...just like to add one of mine about a few of the things said. first, to really quantify a bit rate to an analogue thing...is very possible...after all,that's how they figured out how to make those silly silicon things work in the first place. still, i keep hearing and reading in articles about the sig to noise figures of analogue. digital sound stops at the noise floor..gives great figures for s/n, it's true. analogue does not stop at the noise floor! a mid-fi table or tape goes below the noise floor by some 6 to 12 db; a hi-rez system will go much lower. so, what you get, is not 60 (actually bout 72) db of sound level (spl) but you must add the 6 to 18 db of sound to this...80 to 90+ db! best proof of analogue and noise floors: go to a busy bar...listen to the...noise! some is louder than your speaking voice and some is lower. yes, our analogue mouths and analogue hears speak and hear within a noisy world.
enough soap box...i like digital, too...don't get me wrong. but when i want to be bathed in glorious sound...i turn off the dvd/cd and pull out some gram parsons or van morrison or emily-lou...and spin some magic!
thank you, t-higg

I actually posted a couple sound snippets in .wav format a couple days ago that proves that it is possible to hear below the digital noise floor. Here's the original post:

The digital noise floor is not an abosolute limit: it is possible with the use of dither (as all digital recording now do) to hear well below it. I actually created a CD containing a series of tests that proves that this works, and does indeed allow the audio to be heard below the noise floor. I have included a couple samples from this CD here. If the dither is of the "noise shaped" variety, you can add an effective 2 bits to the nominal resolution of the digital word. Once you get near and beyond the 16 bit level, the "self noise" of the electrical system, microphone, and acoustic room noise create a natural dither.

The following samples use an 8 bit quantitazation level so that the effects of the quantitization process and of the dither can be clearly heard. For higher bit depths, the effects would be the same, but farther down in level. It consists of a short "excitation" of a 24 bit digital reverb, which was quantitized to the 8 bit level, with and without noise shaped dither. All processing was done in the digital domain.

Sample with noise shaped dither

Sample with no dither

Notice in the dithered example how the reverb tail can be clearly heard to fade BELOW the "hiss", which is the dither noise at the LSB level. The example without dither cuts off abruptly as soon as the level of the reverb tail reaches the limits of the noise floor for 8 bits, which is 48db. This abrupt cut-off was the reason some early CDs sounded like the low level details "fell off into a black hole" - dither was not in common use when digital audio CDs were first introduced. It is now routine practice to use dither in all recording and processing of digital audio. Some companies like Sony (with their "SuperBit Mapping" CDs) use noise shaped dither to increase the audible signal to noise range, allowing a 16 bit CD to have the effective resolution of an 18 bit recording.

All that being said, my studio/home theater, it is a virutal maze of analog tape recorders, turntable, and vacuum tubes


[This message has been edited by soundhound (edited February 15, 2003).]

so you got a collins and a fairchild (or just the collins, SH. i ran a fairchild in the '70's...a pretty stripped down thing...but man, it passed some good sound. glass faders..it was a early '60's model...about 24 chs. earlier i was head engineer for a little studio in missa-sip ee. had a wonderful RCA board to ampex 8 trk heads...and the reverb..tube...was just incredible! we used ta make funny noises threw it. my soundcraft spirit is cleaner and sounds great...but it isn't 'fat' like those collins 'n rca's could be. collins...i used ta work on their military gear in the '60's. had almost forgot about em. i'd like to hear that cd. not over this thing tho. how do they get sound below the dither? tryin to figure that one out. you can hear the edits on some of my older Lpees.. a friend w/ a studio was over the other day...freaked him out..listening to mint 'box tops'...he even knew what kinda reverb/echo box they were using...i think i made a convert outta him. as to the step-up...was that the original ? or was that somewhere else. my only regret with the ARC,is that it's a MM input only, i think. no man-uel. got it used. need to go to their site...duhhh...i've only had it for four years! not enough time to look it up. using an old cartridge a friend gave me. he had it packed away for years n never used it. an 'Audiophile', Empire...the thing is rated from...get this, 5hz. to way past 20k. i couldn't believe the difference between it and the one that came w/ the Music Hall..that is a steal of a table. my pro-ject costs 2x it...and i prefer the MH by a slight margin. had a B & O for years that was very good n sexy. very smooth response, very expensive...the Empire/MH smokes it. wish i'd grabbed a sota when i was pushin stereo. there r so many good tables out there now 'nd cartridges n step ups too. the ARC is very similar in sound to the c-j. ahhh,but i do love c-j. now their step ups r oh so nice. useta make a nuvistor model, is it still being made? vistor's were on a card in a box suspended inside the chassis. mew-cho expensive,tho.

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t higg

That Collins does sound great. I use it quite a bit for vocals and dialogue, and it smoothes it out wonderfully. Kind of looks cool too, in a Frankenstein/Reto/Industrial way