AudioBanter.com - View Single Post - Need Help Removing Buzz From Digitized LP Audio

On 1 Oct 2003 08:52:46 -0400, (Mike Rivers) wrote:
Try recording a CD on your computer through the same path (less the
phono preamp) as you're using for your turntable and see if the noise
disappears. If it doesn't, you need to do some optimizing on your
computer. This mostly involves turning off things that might
momentarily interrupt the recording process and playing with buffer
sizes in the sound card driver. The standard guilty parties are
auto-detect of a CD, virus checkers, and screen savers. Those
constantly check to see if they need to do something, interrupting
whatever the computer is trying to do (write audio data on disk) at
the moment.

Hi Mike. That's a good suggestion. I haven't done exactly this but I
have run a series of 30 minute recordings in which all my equipment
was turned on and the turntable was spinning but the tone arm remained
locked in its cradle. My thought was periodic computer noise would
show up easily against an otherwise quiet background. So far, I
haven't seen any problems. The recordings are always uniformly quiet.
There is some 60Hz ripple at about -75dBfs and there are even quieter
120Hz spikes (switching power supply is my guess) but I haven't seen
anything resembling the noise I've been calling "buzz". I'm not
particularly worried about the 60Hz ripple. It's 30 or 40dB below the
surface noise off my typical LP. It goes away along with the surface
noise when I apply the Sonic Foundry noise reduction plug-in.

Charlie Hubbard