The people who use our boards.

Who are you, and what do you do? What do you like to do outside of work?

I’m Steve, and my day job is serving as an audit director. I lead an office of about 10–15 auditors in a daily effort to protect taxpayer dollars from fraud, waste, and abuse. I do performance audits; I actually don’t know very much about debits and credits, and don’t ask me for tax advice. Mostly what I do is write stuff—mostly audit reports—which I think I’m suited for with a bachelors in English from LaSalle University. And I attend lots of meetings on Teams. I started off as an intern 33 years ago, when we had an office of 20 people sharing three desktop computers.

I spend most of my free time archiving my music collection. I started off just ripping CDs, but nowadays I’m solely focused on digitizing my vinyl collection. I’ve been doing needle drops on and off now for over 20 years and picked up lots of tips and tricks over the years. I have a whole workflow process that starts with scanning and cleaning up cover art and ends with the goal of a flat and clean 24/96 transfer of what was originally cut to wax, free of as much analog detritus (clicks, crackle, rumble) as possible. I generally focus on stuff from the ’70s to the early ’90s, before the loudness wars began and they still cut records from analog tape. Music genres include punk, postpunk, hardcore, metal, new wave, reggae, and hip-hop. A lot of this stuff either never got released on CD or if it did it was mastered in inferior quality. I have a lot of rare cassettes that I plan to archive, too, but I’d like to upgrade my cassette deck first.

When I’m not on the clock or digitizing vinyl, I watch (and collect) horror/exploitation movies, go to the gym, and get tortured by a crazy polydactyl kitten named Barnabas.

What hardware do you use?

I built my current PC during the pandemic, but it does everything I need it to do. It’s driven by an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X with 32 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Super. And about 10 TB of SSD hard drive space plus a couple of external drives. For archiving and file-serving purposes I also have a 68 TB NAS that I built probably ten years ago using UNRAID plus a smaller 34 TB Synology DS418play NAS. My mouse is a Logitech MX Vertical.

For scanning, I’ve got a Viisan 3120 A3 scanner as well as a Canon CanoScan 9000F. Both have serious drawbacks but can usually get the job done.

My vinyl archiving setup is centered around a Technics SL-1000R direct drive turntable and a Luxman EQ-500 phono preamp (upgraded with NOS medical-grade Amperex and Telefunken tubes). Analog-to-digital conversion is handled via a Sugarcube SC-2 Mini, which employs a fantastic algorithm to eliminate a good percentage of vinyl’s inherent crackle and clicks. Monitoring is done via a pair of Genelec 8340A nearfield monitors (or Sennheiser HD-6XX headphones) and an RME ADI-2 Pro FS R audio interface.

I’ve accumulated an interesting collection of phono cartridges over the years, ranging from a Hana Umami Red MC cartridge to an obscure ADC TRX-3 MM. After doing a ton of listening tests and measurements, I finally settled on the Shure V15 V-MR, with its beryllium cantilever, microline stylus, and dynamic stabilizer—this is one of the absolute pinnacles of cartridge technology, an amazing feat considering the relatively cheap price these sold for in the ’80s.

And what software?

My PC is running Windows 11.

I use a combination of Affinity and Gimp 2.10 to clean up and do color correction on artwork scans.

For audio cleanup tasks, I use Acon Digital’s Acoustica Premium Edition. This is a really good wave editor and I prefer it to Izotope RX, which seems to be the industry standard for audio restoration work. Acoustica also has a pretty good click-removal tool that I’ve gotten really adept at using effectively. And its batch processor saves me a ton of time and work. It’s also significantly cheaper than Izotope.

For sample rate conversion, I use SoX. For file format conversion, I use XRecode. For file tagging, I use Mp3tag and foobar2000.

Ultimately everything is added to my library in Roon and, for when I’m out of the house, Plexamp (because I’ve never been able to get Roon ARC to work for this). And for other mundane tasks, I rely on MS Office. Or Notepad.

What’s your keyboard setup like? Do you use a custom layout or custom keycaps?

I use a ZSA Voyager with stock pro red keycaps and a Colemak layout. This is my first split, programmable keyboard and I’ve used QWERTY my whole life, so it’s been a learning process to say the least haha. I like having different layers and probably need to play around with that and macros more.

What would be your dream setup?

I really can’t complain about my setup, except for the scanner. I’d absolutely love to get a professional large document scanner, or more realistically the Epson Expression 13000XL.

I wouldn’t mind a phono cartridge upgrade. The Technics EPC-100CMK3 (and the rarer MK4) was probably the greatest phono cartridge ever made. Unfortunately, they stopped making them in the ’80s, and by now most if not all suffer from collapsing suspensions. I own a beautiful MK3, but the suspension is bad. So all I really need is a handful of NOS styli with good suspensions… or, more realistically, a time machine!

I eventually would like to get a high-end solid-state phono preamp to give the Luxman a run for its money. Something like a Whest Titan would be nice. I’ve heard good things, but would like to see some actual measurements.

And I should probably start looking into upgrading my PC and NAS setup because they’re both getting a little long in the tooth.