No need reminding that digitising vinyl is not the sort of job best left to a mate
who boasts he's got a decent turntable and reckons he's a bit of an expert on hi fi ???

The Bulmer factory pressed CD of "Bright Phoebus" that he was selling at high price on Amazon
was plagued with vocal distortion.
Indicating that if it was a vinyl rip, the original pressing was knackered
and / or he just quickly copied it off on his cheap home stereo music centre.

Here is an example of what genuine expert vinyl rippers would consider minimum standard equipment and procedure
to capture a real state of the art digital trasfer:

Names withheld for errmm.. reasons...

1 - "Vinyl ripping notes:
Equipment:
VPI HW-17F Vacuum Record Cleaner
Technics SL-1210 T/T, Custom power supply,
Rega RB 300 Tonearm,
Denon DL304 M/C Cartridge
NAD 3130 M/C Stage
M-Audio Profire 610 A/D
Adobe audition 3.0

Method:
Clean records, rip (PCM@96/32), remove subsonic (-18Hz)
Manual and carefully targeted automatic de-clicking in software. I make sure this doesn't damage natural clicks.
Occasional use of noise masking techniques such as fading sampled groove noise to mono during track changes, etc.
Normalize whole sides to 100%, Split tracks
FLAC, MD5, M3U, Discogs Tagging, DR, RAR, +Redbook (16-bit dithered in Audition), FTP

This LP's school report:
A++ with gold stars. If only all vinyl was made this way. 180 gram, clean as a whistle, flat as a pancake, on-centre, nearly perfect except for very, very stray little clicks. Hardly had to do a thing. Nice. Mastered with great skill by Doug Sax at TML (The Mastering Lab) and all stamps bear the TML-M mark."



2 - "Vinyl Ripping Process/Equipment

VPI 16.5 RCM
Turntable: VPI Scoutmaster
Tonearm: Trans-Fi Termninator
Cartridge: Audio-Technica AT33PTG loaded at 80 ohms
Phono Stage: Musical Surroundings Phonomena
Digital Interface: E-MU 1212
Recording Software: Adobe Audition 3.01
Recording Bitrate/Sample Rate: 192/24

Post Processing
Run thru ClickRepair at level 10 with
Pitch Protection | off
Reverse | on
Simple
Resample to 96khz in Izotope Rx2 using the default preset
Manually listen to album in Adobe Audition cleaning any clicks/anomalies
Flac with Xrecode II


What Exactly Is An "Ultimate Master"

It is more or less a catchphrase originally used to designate something was a hi-res rip. But since there seems to be a lot "similarly" named rips now I guess I should explain.

I try to present the "ultimate mastering" of a particular LP, the "mastering" is not my equipment or process but the source material, it has always been about finding the best source. Now my opinion of the best source is subject to change as I experience more variations. Whether or not folks think my rip is "definitive" is irrelevant to me, I just try to find the best pressing and don't mind doing the extra clean up that comes with not just ripping new reissues or japanese issues. I understand the appeal of these pressings but I don't subscribe to the notion that they represent the best source 95% of the time."