Distortion when using Phono jack

Question

I want to post a fresh thread on this topic because I had a little trouble finding the correct advice, and initially took the wrong advice.
When I first connected up to my stereo using Airport Express the output was heavily distorted.
Turns out this is because I was using the Phono input jack, which, according to this Apple article, applifies the input levels more than the other input jacks:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=108059
So the solution is to use any other input jack.

Answer 1

I'm not necessarily saying that this is all there is to it, but it's a sad fact of life that when you remove a lot of the artefacts, especially from an old recording, what's left often appears to be worse than what was there in the first place. Previously you didn't notice them so much, but when you remove clicks, pops, scratches and hiss you often reveal less than stellar recordings - and a lot of older jazz seems to be particularly bad in this respect. Look at Blue Note for example; good for musicians from 39-53, but after that, good for everybody - Rudy Van Gelder's recordings were a very considerable technical  improvement on the earlier output.
It sort-of follows really that one thing you have to be careful of with the click and pop eliminator is not to overdo it (sensitivity and discrimination). Another thing to try, if you are doing other processing too is to find out whether on your recordings, there's a difference between processing the noise before the clicks, or vice versa - that's not exactly unknown. Also, even though you can auto-find all levels, it's worth experimenting with some other different settings too - especially the max threshold settings if you are getting peak distortion.
But the results vary from transcription to transcription, so it's just about impossible to be more specific about what to try. It goes almost without saying that your turntable and cartridge setup needs to be correct, although it's surprising how many people forget about this these days. How well a record is tracked on the turntable can easily make as much difference as the degree of wear does to the results.
In general though, distortion reduction simply can't be achieved. The first person to find a way of accurately removing non-harmonically related distortion from recordings without any reference to the original signals is going to retire very rich!