Vinyl introduces undesirable surface artifacts. But the ADC in the USB output circuit sounds good enough (the computer identifies it as Burr-Brown), so I choose to keep it simple. The alternative is to play the analog signal out of the turntable into an old pre-amp with phono input equalization, and then into the AVR, to use its high quality ADC chip. The USB digital input goes directly into CD Spin Doctor. I play the vinyl on an inexpensive Audia-Technica USB turntable. This is similar to the above, except the digital input enters the computer via USB rather than S/PDIF.
But I still had a bunch of DAT recordings to input to iTunes. Back when DAT was big, I bought such a used drive with thoughts of using it for computer input of DAT recordings, but before I got around to it, direct hard drive recording came on the scene and DAT faded into semi-obsolescence for audio recording purposes. They were configured in certain workstations from Silicon Graphics. There were some computer DAT drives having firmware that will handle audio DAT as well as data DAT. (Alternatively, the free application Audacity provides similar functionality, but without the direct connection for import to iTunes.) Here I identify the start and end of the individual tracks manually via the displayed wave forms, aided by the track listing and times, and then have Spin Doctor do a direct import of the set of tracks into iTunes.
I capture the tape playback signal in CD Spin Doctor, an application distributed with Roxio’s Toast. I input the digital stereo signal from the DAT player into the AVR, which gets forwarded to the computer. But they can also be pointed to an external multi-channel sound source, such as a FireWire audio I/F. Usually, these are set to the stereo digital in and out ports on the iMac. On the Mac, there are two places where the I/O routing from external devices is performed, in the OS X Audio Midi Utility, and in the preferences panel for whatever software will process the signal. It also has dual-differential Burr-Brown (TI) converters, and thus is the DAC of choice for listening to music on the computer. I have an old A/V receiver (AVR) connected to these ports and providing a maze of connection possibilities via optical and coax digital connections. In accumulating out-of-print (O-O-P) music from various sources and migrating old recordings to iTunes, I needed to solve some technical issues discussed below.
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