On Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:43:44 +0000, Eiron
wrote:

I wanted to digitize some LPs but my decent phono preamp was lost in the
last house move.
The Behringer UFO202 phono preamp with USB looked worth trying for £25.
Using a USB wall-wart it can be used as a pre-amp with line out and
headphone socket.
I plugged it into a laptop USB port and used Nero to record albums.
The gain is fixed and it seems to be just 16 bit 44.1KHz.
Using a Shure M97xE, I had to double the level of most tracks, and
triple a few.
So that's an effective 15 bit resolution.
As usual, there's no technical information available from Behringer.
As for the sound quality - I'm undecided.
Now I'm back in the land of vinyl, I can never be sure that I've
got the best out of a playing. The fact that everything sounds ****
may be just all the distortion and noise inherent in vinyl.
I'll have to re-copy some albums that I copied a few years ago with
an excellent E.F. Taylor preamp (Wireless World, September 1977)
and compare the sound.

Goldwave's pop/scratch filter is excellent, and in the good bits
between the scratches, the output is identical to the input (a bit
perfect copy).
It's amusing to subtract the output from the input file, leaving just
an album's worth of scratches. Then mix it with your CDs so they sound
like LPs.

To summarize, the UFO202 is pretty good for the price but could be better,
and leaves me with a burning desire to build another real preamp,
tweak my Thorens/SME/Shure combination to perfection, and still not be
satisfied.
Addiction is a terrible thing.

Sounds like Behringer got it spot on. They have given you between 6
and 18dB of headroom, which is about what you would aim at for a live
recording (more like 18 than 6 unless you are really well rehearsed).
Don't worry about the net number of active bits. They manifest
themselves as noise level, and as long as that is below what is
already on the vinyl, there is nothing to worry about. I promise, the
removal a few net bits will not be any kind of issue when digitizing
vinyl.

d