4 – CLEAN / CLEAN PLUS
Preface
Welcome and thank you for your decision to use CLEAN or CLEAN PLUS.
Using CLEAN/CLEAN PLUS, your PC and your CD recorder, you can
create your personal audio CD or MP3 CD (data CD) from other CD, vinyl
or cassette recordings. CLEAN gives you the easy-to-use optimized high-
quality tools that let you compile and even professionally restore the audio in
the process.
The software of both products is identical. The only difference between
CLEAN and CLEAN PLUS is, that the latter comes with a Phono PreAmp.
We assume that you have previously not been working as a restoration engi-
neer or CD producer and we would therefore like to introduce you to some of
the topics that pop up when the issues “Making music on your PC” and
“Record player handling” are involved. Many years after the successful intro-
duction of the CD many people will still know what a record is and how to
handle it, but the specifics and the necessary technical devices for the best
playback conditions might not be that clearly present in memory any more.
The path from the record player into your PC
You will surely have recorded music on your PC before. You own a sound
card with good AD/DA converters and nothing was more simple than plug-
ging the output of your CD player or CD-ROM drive into the input of your
sound card and record music as a WAV file. The level could easily be ad-
justed and the sound of the WAV file met your expectations.
If – on the other hand – you wish to record music from a vinyl record this way,
you definitely need a pre-amplifier. That is why CLEAN PLUS includes one.
Directly connecting your record player to your sound card would not give
you a usable signal. Even if you could feed your sound card with a high level
signal, the treble would be distorted and the signal would sound incom-
plete. The reason for this is that the record player only transfers a very low
useful signal.
Another aspect is, that a record does not provide a well balanced frequency
spectrum. Instead, it gives you a lot of treble and not much bass. This is the
result of the technology used: a good sounding bass would produce strong
record groove deflections that in turn would cause the stylus to jump to the
next groove upon each bass drum hit.
For this reason the CLEAN Phono PreAmp has a special phono input, same
as Hi-fi amplifiers. Besides providing the pre-amplification, this input is
equipped with a special equalizer, optimized for record playback. The equal-
izer makes up for the effect of the “bent” frequency characteristics of the
record by separately amplifying the treble and bass signal components.
