OK, now. Everybody’s talking about burning vinyl. Goody goody for them.
Me, I’m burning shellac. Yes, the dreaded prehistoric 78rpm groove biscuits.
(Now comes the part where he says “Thing is”.)
Thing is…something somewhere goes terribly wrong. Either between my turntable and my (RIAA-pwned, commercial) CD recorder, between the recorder and my amp, or between the turntable and my amp. (I’m pretty sure I’ve got the amp in between the TT and the CD-R, but I have very poor abstract/spatial reasoning, so I could have ballsed that up very easily and never known it.)
Result: I get CD burns that sound just great thru headphones. Any headphones. On any player, iPod included. But try putting them thru the speakers, on any player, and you get a lot of noise (crackle and hiss) and a very dim signal.
Check again that you have the amp connected properly, and turned up enough. Vinyl turntables produce a very weak signal compared to other music sources, so it needs decent amplification when recording.
Does your CD recorder have a recording level display? If so you should be able to use that to see whether the input has enough oomph.
You are using the phono input on the amp, and the line out to the cd recorder right? There is an equalization function on the phono input that is needed and not included in microphone inputs, or line inputs (which also expec a much higher signal level) In particular, you’ll lose a ton of bass…which the headphones probably can’t respond to anyhow.
Thanks for answering, but I’m sorry, I just can’t understand this. Can you please rephrase? What do the line inputs need and not need? And how do mic inputs figure in at all?
There’s a lot less bass when played thru the speakers - also a lot less midrange. It’s as if you’d taken the first seven sliders on a 10-band EQ and just gone shoomp.
Beware of Doug, is it possible that your speakers are connected out of phase?
78rpm records are mono, which means that the same sound should be coming out of both left and right speakers. When you use headphones, there’s no chance of connecting the left and right drivers out-of-phase because they’re hard-wired during manufacture. However, with most speakers you will have done some of the wire connections yourself, and it’s possible that you wired them out of phase. You might want to check the connections: do the wires go from (red / +) terminal on the amp to (red / +) terminal on the speaker, and (black / -) to (black / -)? [It’s OK if you have both speakers connected “the wrong way round”, but not just one.]
When a mono signal drives a pair of identical speakers that are connected out of phase, there should be no sound at all at points equidistant to the two speakers. In practice, what happens is that the bass (long wavelength) frequencies disappear almost completely, the midrange less so, and you’ll still hear some high frequencies. However – assuming your turntable has a stereo phono cartridge with a mono 78 needle – much of the surface noise of the 78 will naturally be out of phase with respect to the L and R channels, and will sound much louder through out-of-phase speakers than through in-phase speakers or headphones. It seems as though that’s what you’re describing in the OP.
Have you recently changed the configuration of your amp and speakers? Usually you can tell if they’re connected out of phase even with normal stereo signals, but the phenomenon is much more apparent with a mono signal such as that from your 78.
[It might also help to know the make and model #s of the turntable, cartridge, amp and speakers to know if I’m on the right track or way off-base here.]
As a quick test, try swapping the + and - (or red/black) connections at just one end of the speaker cable of just one of the speakers. Play your CD. Does it sound better? If so, you’ve solved the problem – and your stereo-recorded CDs (i.e. non-78) should sound better too!