Help With Vinyl / LP to WAV / CD

[TenaciousJP]

It doesn't have tracking controls, unfortunately. I double-checked the manual and the table itself to make sure.

I'll try to mess with the tone arm, then.

Thanks, everyone.

[Cornucopia]

Careful wit the tonearm counterbalance. If you put too much force on the stylus, you'll do damage and prematurely wear out both your LPs and the stylus. Good hifi stores used to have a little calibration device (basically a mini-weight scale) for correctly adjusting this.

The oldskool way to do this on lower quality tonearms was to tape a quarter to the top of the cartridge!

Scott

[KBeee]

Some tonearms have a slide along the arm to set the downward pressure. You set the arm with the counterweight until it's balanced, then slide a weight along the arm towards the cartridge to set the downforce. There's usually calibration markings on the arm to set the weight in grammes.

[pepegot1]

The easy solution, which improves the sound quality, is to purchase a USB Tutntable. I have an ION USB Turntable, coupled with Audacity, it can copy any 33, 45 or 78 (tranforms 78's using Audacity, other speeds are direct.) Done work hard, work smart.
See at: http://www.ion-audio.com/ittusb.php

[TenaciousJP]

Yeah, now that I think of it, I don't want to mess with the arm and risk ruining my records. They're some pretty hard-to-find records, and they certainly aren't on cassette or CD (if they were, I'd just buy them again).

I think that I am going to just go with the USB turntable eventually when I save up enough.

Thank you everyone for your help. I'll update this if I figure out anything.

[rumplestiltskin]

Another thing to try is to adjust/increase the phono cartridge force. It is normlly done by moving the tone arm counter weight ( at the back of the tone arm ) forward.

...or, as we used to do back in the 60's, tape a nickel on top of the tone arm right above the needle. Downside was that we could imagine the vinyl being stripped out of the groove.