About

Summary of Opinions

The driving forces behind DropStation and Burntable drive our roadmap and overall product design philosophy.  We'll spare you an exhaustive corpus for now and just give you the highlights:

  1. We believe analog capture should always be true to the source.  We don't believe in "doctoring" the sound of vinyl in any way.  If your vinyl/setup produces "pops and clicks" so be it.  If the vinyl is dirty, clean it.  This philosophy of purism is why we only support (>=) 24bit capture at very low levels; levels whereby any pops and clicks that do occur will not clip the digital signal.
  2. No dynamics, EQ or other processing.  Our standards aim for accuracy, always.  Every engineering decision is based on minimal impact on the incoming analog signal.  This includes capturing in a quiet place at very low monitoring levels (or in headphones) to prevent inadvertently distorting sound that may travel back into the signal by way of acoustic energy resonating on the vinyl itself.
  3. We have a tremendous amount of respect for Mastering Engineers.  Peak limiting must be done very carefully and across (in most cases) the entire release.  Burntable's cloud Drop Processor does this for you, as does the DropStation (internally) which utilizes the same two-stage analysis and operation algorithm across all sides of the analog media.  Whether your pressing is from 1945 or 2022, we are interested in preserving every single decision made by the mastering engineer.
  4. We support artists and rights holders.  Playback of all audio publicly available on the Burntable platform is rigorously tracked via ISRC so that Artists and Labels can be paid for their time, work and (in the case of record labels) sizable investments. 
  5. We support contributors, too.  Taking the time to capture vinyl is an awesome thing.  The pricing structure of Burntable will always honor Artists/Rights-holders, Contributors and lastly Burntable itself.  Our Vinyl Discovery pricing structure will always reflect our opinions and beliefs on transparency and generally doing the right thing. 

Why Vinyl Usually Sounds Better

We have a living playlist of YouTube videos that we think best demonstrate why good vinyl sounds superior to good (anything else).  The more we came to understand about the vinyl mastering process the more we understood what it was we liked so much about the sound of vinyl.  Maybe your experience will be the same.