HEVYDEVY FORUMS

Hi dudes and dudettes,

this is pretty silly me putting this in the musicians corner, but hey...I will only have to ban myself.

Anyway, it is naff because I am not really making music, but I have been having a problem with recording samples and want some advice. It goes like this:

Recently I have been using my old MiniDisc player in combination with a shitty wee microphone to take samples of things and people while I am out and about. The quality on the disc is very, very high. If I play back the track with headphones or using my MD deck and speakers, it comes out fine. So, no problem with that I think.

The problem arises when I try and record that to my PC. Now, when I connect up the MD (doesn't matter what method I use to do this) and listen to the disc without recording, it still sounds awesome. However, if I then record this noise and play it back from the PC, it sounds nowhere near as good. There is no clipping or anything like that....it just sounds kind of flat or with no 'presence'. It is normally very loud and clear but I cant seem to retain that when I record to the PC.

Does that make sense?

It is confusing me because when I have everything wired up and ready to record, I can play the MD and listen in high quality, but not record in high quality. I dont understand that!

Help!

Could it be something format related? If it's a Sony MD it uses ATRAC, right? Could it be that you lose quality when you transfer it to the PC, if it converts the format?

Persuader wrote:Could it be something format related? If it's a Sony MD it uses ATRAC, right? Could it be that you lose quality when you transfer it to the PC, if it converts the format?

No, its not that. I should have mentioned that I am recording using analogue cables.

The sound that I hear through the PC while playing the MD shouldn't be much different from the sound I hear through the PC while playing a recording of the MD, but it is.

Something is lost in translation, but I dont know how or where.

I hope I am not being too confusing here, I realise it is a difficult thing to explain clearly.

As is typical of me, especially with problems I have been stewing over for some time, the answer only reveals itself when I have given up and decided to ask other people for help.

Turns out that recording a sample straight to 32-bit gives this loss in quality. Recording straight to 16-bit and then upsampling seems to solve the problem.

I have no idea why this should be!

Upsampling is a dirty word. Once something has been recorded 16 bit you can never get it to match 32 bit quality, because you only have half the data. Or am I being stupid?

Biert wrote:Upsampling is a dirty word. Once something has been recorded 16 bit you can never get it to match 32 bit quality, because you only have half the data. Or am I being stupid?

This is correct as far as I know. Though for recording samples, 16bit is fine. All the mixing I do is done at the 32bit level, even if the final product is 16bit audio.

Recording in 32bit just didnt seem to work, which is very strange. Though not critical with the nonsense I am recording.

The real problem is shitty analog to digital convertors on your PC's sound card, can you transfer digitally? With S/pdif or lightpipe?

7lights wrote:The real problem is shitty analog to digital convertors on your PC's sound card, can you transfer digitally? With S/pdif or lightpipe?

Yeah I can do that with the Optical out on my MD deck to my PC, but it made no difference. Should it make a difference?