For Playing Really REALLY Old Records

I've wanted one of these devices for many years, and I finally have one!

It's the KAB Vintage Singal Processor, and it's specifically for playing old records. 

I play a lot of records going back to the late 19-teens, right up through the 20's, 30's, 40's, etc, on both my Part 15 and ar my work station. 

I get very frustrated trying to process them correctly in a computer. for me, real time analog is where it is at.  I've known about the KAB units for years but never could afford one.  I finally decided to spend the mney over 6 months ago, and of course they didn't have any.  They aren't made in mass quantities.  They're made by hand with very high end components. When you want one, you place an order and get on the waiting list, which is where I've been since before Christmas.  Low and behold it arrived yesterday!

I've only had maybe an hour to play with it, but the first thing I said was "amazing". 

If you're not a vintage record geek, bear with me.  For the curious, read on.

Old records (what most folks call "78's" were not recorded with the RIAA equalization that is built into every record player and or amp with a phono input since the late 1950's.  If you play a record from, say, 1929 on a modern machine it sounds horrible.  Surface noise, wrong EQ, rumble, etc.  Once you get a proper (larter) stylus for these records, you need to eq them right.

The KAB unit has many pre-set eq curves, dating from the days of acoustic recording, right up to the current RIAA standard.  Hit the button, and the curve is set for the vintage of your record. 

It has an impulse noise limited, that supresses clicks, pops, cracks, etc without screwing with the actual music.  It has a rumble filter that removes anything below 30Hz, a tuneable and notched high cut filter to get rid of background surface noise, and a dynamic noise filter with a varying passband that varies according to the treble content of the music.  You can really supress a lot of noise while keeping the music intact. 

It also has a switch for playing vertically cut records -- you can actually play an Edison disc on your turntable and it sounds AMAZING. You generally hear almost nothing from an Edison record unless you have a rare vertical cartridge and stylus. 

it's got a nice batch of outputs, as well as a line in, in case you have some old tapes, etc that you'd like to run through it.

Now, it's designed for MONO sources -- after all, those old records were all mono. So the stereo lines from your turntable go in, and mono comes out.  Amazingly clean, eq'ed mono.

It even has a control that lets you fade between which side of the groove your listening to, as old records sometimes have one side of the groove worn more than the other, or one side might be damaged while the other is clean -- doesn't make a difference because the output is mono, and as you move between the left or right groove signal it automatically adjusts the mono output to remain level and equal left and right.  You get left and right output frm the machine, but it's in mono. 

I will eventually make some a/b test recordings to share, but just the little bit I've played with it, it can take some records I don't dare use on the air and make them sound pretty darn good.

I like that I can LISTEN to the effects of the controls and adjustments while I'm listening, as compard to recording into the computer, applying an effect or adjustment, listening, undoing, trying again, diddle diddle diddle.  I like analog real time processing. 

You can use it to clean up modern stereo records, but the result will be in mono.  But since at work and play I live on AM radio that's of no concern to me. 

An amazing but expensive box.  Couple photos.

TIB