I don’t quite remember when I first saw an iPod. It was probably when I was a freshman in high school around 2002. Music was in kind of a weird spot at that time. CDs were still mostly on top, tapes were mostly out, vinyl was on life support in its DJ niche and there was this thing called the internet and MP3s that was just barreling onto the scene. Obviously we all know how that turned out. Digital music has become absolutely ubiquitous and with increased storage and processing power, early compression quality problems are now relics of a more barbaric age.
It makes sense then when you hear that since around 2005, physical media sales have been falling faster than an actual lead zeppelin. Even CDs, once the darling child of pure, crystal clear quality have toppled from their place as dominant media type in the mid-2000s. Surprisingly though, from the ashes of digital music’s takeover green shoots of an unlikely variety have started to rise. Vinyl, basically in free fall since the late 1970s, has actually seen a pronounced uptick in recent years, especially among younger people.
Back in the summer of 2005, I decided to undertake the big project of digitizing the bulk of my parents’ record collection. I don’t remember if USB turntables existed at the time, but I bought a regular turntable and connected it to a 1977 Pioneer SA-8500 integrated amplifier. From there, I ran the output to my computer’s sound card and using a program called Audacity, proceeded to digitize album after album. It took a long time. I basically had to sit there listening to every album to monitor the input levels (listening to tons of great albums? Must’ve been torture!).
I’ve never used one of the USB turntables to digitize, so I can’t speak to how they work, but digitizing by just running into the sound card is pretty easy. Just make sure you have some way to see and adjust the input levels so the waveforms don’t get clipped. If you don’t have, or don’t want an amplifier though, a USB turntable is your best bet for digitization.
It’s been almost a decade since my Great Digitization, but the funny thing is, I hardly ever listen to music (other than streaming radio) on my computer nowadays. I’ve basically moved fully to vinyl. Surprisingly, you can get just about any new album on vinyl, and most releases come with a free digital download. This is great because you can get the album, including all the liner notes and artwork, but still have a digital copy as well.
So dust off those turntables, flip through milk crates of records, and bask in the warm sounds of analog music bliss.