The Jan Diaries — Ripping Records Better Than James Bond

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 18 May 2020

In May 2020, with clubs shut and turntables at home doing all the work, The Jan Diaries turned into a workshop. Jan Kinčl used the entry to answer a question he claims almost everybody gets wrong somewhere along the way: how to record a record properly. Ten years of his own mistakes went into the method, and the promise is unusually concrete — a chain costing roughly 1100 to 1200 kuna that produces files close to what an online shop sells, at home and on a large system.

What the piece covers

The column is a step-by-step build. It starts with the turntable itself, which has to sit perfectly level — checked with the Measure app on an iPhone, adjusting the feet until the reading hits zero degrees. Then the cartridge: an Ortofon OM 5E at around 300 kuna, chosen because the elliptical tip meets more of the groove than a spherical one and gives back more detail, more depth and less distortion, tracking at 1.75 grams with the antiskating set to match. Records get a dry microfibre wipe and never water, which only drives dirt deeper into the groove, plus a centre weight to flatten the warp most pressings carry and to even out the signal between the left and right channels.

The first real trap, Kinčl argues, is the phono preamp. The stages built into club mixers are fine for playing out and inadequate for ripping: Pioneer units he writes off outright, and his own Allen & Heath Xone:92 he rates highly as a DJ tool and not at all as a source. His answer is a Rega Fono Mini A2D MK2, a small black box at 850 to 950 kuna that runs the turntable into the computer over USB. From there the piece walks through Logic at 24 bit and 44.1 kHz, peaks parked at −12 dBFS with the useful window between −18 and −12, click removal in Izotope RX 7 using the multi-band De-click at a sensitivity of 2.4 and 4.0 for tired pressings, gain normalisation to −1.0 dB, a linear phase high-pass at 25 Hz with a 24 dB/oct slope, a Gain plugin correcting a stereo image that pulls five percent to the right, and a limiter at +1.5 dB with a 2.0 ms release, −0.3 dB output and 10 ms of lookahead. Everything sits on the recording channel rather than the master, so a whole side exports to AIFF in one pass instead of song by song.

The part that stayed

The strongest passage is the warning attached to that limiter. Kinčl calls it the third and most expensive place people destroy a rip: pushing the gain in the hope the track will come out louder, or work better in a club. Loudness, dynamics and intensity get confused constantly, he writes, and the record has already been mastered by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing — keep the reduction meter under half a decibel and let the gain knob on the mixer do the rest. The nine-minute guide ends with an open door: “Otvoren sam za kvalitetan geek talk”, which is roughly the spirit of the whole thing.