Recording music ??

Just a couple of points. Your reel to reel decks were capable of recording MUCH better quality than your LPs could ever provide. This is to say that they can record all of the quality that the LP had IF the tape was of good quality and the recording technique was good. However, they (tapes) are suseptible to partial erasure from many sources not the least of which is itself and, of course, time.

Without going into a 5000 word tutorial, my recommendations are these:

For God's sake!!!!!! don't use MP3 as a recording algorythm (PLEASE!!!!!!!!) - at the very best it can only record 1/5 of the music content of a CD. It's fine for jogging and for ring tones on your phone but for nothing else unless you're a jackhammer operator or explosives technician who has no hearing left.

Surely by now your tapes are well on their way to being erased or lost due to erasure or fall out (the magnetic particles that hold the music fall off because the glue that holds them to the backing tape dries out). Use the best algorythm you can easily get. Right now, that's probably WMF - although that still uses moderate compression (compression = loss of realism).

Your LPs never came close to being able to capture what a well recorded CD can, but at least we'll hope that you used good recording techniques and quality tape when you recorded them. LPs were the best we could get "in the day". Hopefuly, you took care of them and used the proper cleaners and handling methods.

Before you do any of the transferring, have a pro demagnetize the heads of your machine. A consumer-level de-magger will be a waste of money and you don't likely know how to use it properly (no offense, but many "pro's" I know don't know the proper use of a demagnetizer). This will prevent the tape from being demagnetized as it passes by the repro (playback) head to play the music and thus partially ersasing the music before it comes off the machine (and is forever lost).

Use quality cables for the transfer. The crap that you get in your CD/DVD player's box, etc. is absolute whale sh**. It will strip away much of the electrical signal that represents your music. Do yourself the favor of a lifetime and invest in any of the plenitude of advanced cables available on the common market.

BTW, gold ends are the very LEAST of a cable's selling points. Gold ends only mean that the connection (on the cable's end) won't corrode over time and eventually inhibit signal transfer. Gold is not the best conductor, but it's the best that won't corrode besides platinum which is too expensive to commonly use.

It's what's in the wire itself that matters, the technology involved in the wire's construction. The rule of thumb is that cheap wire means that you're losing signal and wasting money on gear (this is more true for new TVs and DVD/SACD/DVD-A players than for transfers that you intend, but good cables can be used elsewhere when your project is done).

Good luck on your project.

Jim

So how did it go?

I hope you didn't lose any sleep over the cables. When you transfer old tapes there are many other factors that make much more of a difference: flaking, tape alignment errors, AD conversion quality [in other words audio card], recording software, ... all of those things matter much more than what kind of connector you use.