ADC or USB/Firewire Turntable with 24bit192khz ADC

[morgain]

Is Emotiva planning to develop an standalone ADC device in the near future or maybe a usb/firewire turntable with a 24-bit 192khz ADC incorperated?

I have a collection of vinyl which I would love to digitalize preserving the wonderful rich and lifely analogue sound. As 24-bit 192khz downloads are yet still far from widely available, this would be a wonderful solution to take even more advantage of the abilities of the Emotiva XDA-1 DAC which will be available soon.

I've done quite some investigation on this subject but haven't found many standalone high-end 24bit 192khz ADC products and think this could be quite a good opportunity for Emotiva to make a lot of vinyl enthousiasts very happy

Below are some ADC chip manufacturers that offer very good ADC chips:

www.akm.com/prod-adc.asp

www.wolfsonmicro.com/products/adcs/

www.esstech.com/index.php?p=products_ADC


I wonder if there are more people here that would be thrilled by this idea as I am or maybe have found other solutions to capture the rich analogue sound of vinyl in 24bit 192khz in a proper high end and affordable way?

[rockguitar]

If you are a Mac user, the Apogee Duet makes a nice A/D converter with firewire. It includes line level inputs via a dongle. I haven't used it for turntables per se, but have helped used it for live recordings of a piano concert. It is pretty well regarded for its A/D's and its D/A converter but it can record at 24/96. Even guys like John Atkinson of Stereophile use this unit for portable recording.

I did a lot of research this year into the combination of quality and value for the recording interface, and since my brother in law is a mac user, the choice was pretty simple. There are a number of other interfaces out there, but going between a line level source (i.e. after the phono preamp) and the different impedences required by pro audio gear require an impedence matching circuit. We tried the Presonus Firebox and didn't use one, so it didn't sound very good. I couldn't tell how good the A/D's in the Presonus were because of this.

[morgain]

In my search I've come across the Apogee duet, which had good reviews, but like you say it has a few downfalls like supporting only Mac and a max sample rate of 96khz. As ADC it could be a solution if I can make my laptop into a dual boot system (not preferable) ( BTW the DAC functionality is less convienient as it cannot act as standalonbe DAC for a mediastreamer as it needs to be connected to a pc). 1 advantage is that you can use the Pure Vinyl LP recording software with it which is also only available for Mac. But unfortunately it just isn't the ideal solution for high end digitalising Vinyl because of above mentioned reasons.

As for a lot of other ADC equipment is either of inferior quality (not able to preserve the analogue sound of vinyl sufficiantly) and doesn't support 24bit 192khz or directed at musicstudio's (Apogee Rosetta etc) and very expensive besides the fact that most esthetically look horrible in your livingroom.

The are also some solutions like professional internal soundcards for pc's but the noise from the electronic components in a pc seems to affect the quality of the recordings and the are not of much use for people using laptops. The USB/Firewire external soundcards/audio interfaces I allready described above.

I think Emotiva could jump into this home listener gap perfectly if they succeed to make a high end ADC for a reasonable price which is able to capture the anlogue sound of vinyl in all it's glory. A 24-bit 192khz USB/Firewire Turntable with a very good analogue capturing ADC chip and high quality phono stage would be even more ideal.

Then it would be possible to preserve your precious vinyl records and still enjoy the wonderful analogue sound by streaming them through the XDA-1 from a laptop, mediastreamer or even playing a self made DVD-A (thinking rightaway of a Emotiva blu-ray player which supports DVD-A )

[VDCF6M1]

I went a somewhat different route for dubbing my vinyl, and I have to say I have been very satisfied with the results.

I bought an ADC that uses the same basic approach as SACD: KORG MR1. 1bit 2.8Mhz! digitization.

The conversions have been nothing short of stunning. The encoded files will use a ton of disk space, but that has to be expected at the higher resolution.

It digitizes to the following formats:
DSD with 10-100k Hz bandwidth (also DFF, WSD, DSF) digital audio (1 bit encoding at 2.8 Mhz!). AND 10-40k Hz 24 bit PCM wave at all standard sample rates from 44.1-to-192k

Native playback of DSD files is an issue unless you own a SONY consumer product or can spend about $30K on a pro SACD processor.

I use a VAIO laptop which has a "sound reality" audio DAC capable of playing DSD files natively...