Setting Up Your Hardware

If you have an antique, Edison, wire drum recording, or any other non-electrical device you will have to record it through a microphone. Old records (even the very old 16 inch acetate or 12 inch cellulose disks) recorded at any speed can be played back through a modern turntable and digitized. The recorded speed, even if it sounds like chipmunks, can be slowed down without any loss of sound quality.

Your input device can be a microphone or anything that plays through speakers. However if your input device (tape player, etc.) has an output port, even if only for earphones, it makes things much easier. Otherwise you'll have to connect wires to the speaker connections.

The physical connection between your input device and your computer is made with a cable that plugs into your sound card. Most modern sound cards will  have at least three mini-stereo input/output ports marked Speaker, Microphone and Auxiliary. (Sometimes Line In instead or as well as auxiliary.) You can connect the output of your input device to the auxiliary, microphone or line in port but you may want to try to see which gives you the best results. In many cases they're the same but on high quality cards the auxiliary and/or line-in port is buffered for amplified sound.

Unfortunately, output jacks on sound equipment can be anything from a 1/4" microphone plug, to RCA jacks while your sound card will probably have mini stereo inputs. Fear not however. You can easily buy or make cables to mate one device to the other. You can also extend cables with shielded, twisted pair telephone cord. Just be sure you match the pairs on both ends. Tape your connections then wrap each wire individually with foil and tape it again. Your spinning hard drive will create a scream on your recording if your cable isn't well shielded.

If your input source is an old turntable with a crystal cartridge you'll need to amplify the output before inputting it into the computer. The more modern, magnetic cartridges produce enough amplitude to go directly from the phone jack to your PC. We found that Elex Atelier has a complete stock of parts for turntables and how-to pages for installing cartridges and adjusting tone arm pressure.