audio question

Does anyone know what program I can use to record with line-in besides Musicmatch. They had it before and now you have to update to Plus to use that option. Went to their site and they wanted my Credit Card # and it didn't say it was a secure site. Thanks in advance.

 

Windows Sound Recorder will record whatever's playing, direct to .wav file. You can manipulate it from there.

 

Thanks I'll try it.

 

Windows sound player won't work for me as I have about 12-15 hours of recording to do.

 

An LP or a tape perhaps? Anyway. You could try GoldWave... http://www.pcmech.com/show/reviews/347/

The trial might do you.

 

www.dbpoweramp.com

Db power amp music converer with optional auxiallary/line-in download

Works great, and its free.

 

Old country vinyl albums from the early to late 50's. Old Hank Williams, not jr. Jimmie Rodgers, Webb Pierce, I mean old stuff. Need to record off turntable to pc. Don't want to let it go. Been offered some nice $ for them.

 

Man I've been wanting to do that also.I want'ed to put it in dvd audio format because that would record to 26bit96 with is the best you in quality you can do.16 bit you will lose quality .Records on a good turntable will smoke any cd player or transport

 

True DAT! The dynamic range of an LP is just that much greater and that much more exciting, which a 16-bit CD just can't do justice... In fact 24-bit probably can't do it justice either, but its closer. 16-bit has everything crammed into the top 6dB... compressed to hell... all sounds the same. But never mind

You can do 32bit recording, with 96k sample rate... BUT its only for very limited applications and AFAIK there is NO consumer sound card that supports it.

 

Sounds like you've got some valuable stuff there Doc!

Goldy, vinyl has had a mystique all it's own since the digital CDs first came out. I was an audio nut through the transition, and remember all the arguments for/against digital. But dynamic range wasn't part of it's attraction. Dynamic range on a vinyl album was the max output level minus the inherent noise level of the medium. Max output level was limited by the amount of needle travel you could allow, and how wild a wave-form a needle could follow. The vinyl media had an inherent noise of about 40 decibels; just the sound of the needle scraping on the groove. Plus, the recording back then was done to tape, and the master tape had it's own hiss. In the 50s there was no Dolby or DBX compression, and the master tapes had a sound/noise ratio of about 60 db tops. As far as dynamic range, that was IT. Later albums improved some, as the master tapes got better due to better tape formulations and compression schemes, but never exceeded around 90db for the very best of them IIRC. Add vinyl scrape and platter rumble and strictly by the numbers, vinyl albums had a true dynamic range usually around 70 db tops.

Early CDs had over 100 db dynamic range for the format itself, but most of what was recorded was from analog tape masters, and reissues of older stuff with poor quality masters were still somewhat hissy unless cleaned up artificially. Early era CDs tended to sound shrill and sharp in the high frequencies, and audio purists criticized that as a fault of the digital conversion (and THAT'S what gave CD a bad rep with some purists.). It wasn't. When mixing for vinyl, which was inherently somewhat lossy in the high frequencies, the record producers had always recorded an overly hot signal to compensate, and were used to hearing that mix in the studio. So they recorded hot mixes to the CDs, which had a FLAT high end, which sounded harsh. After a few years, particularly after they quit marketing vinyl as equal to the CDs, they quit doing that and newer CDs sound better than the old vinyl equivelants. And with inherently better dynamic range, they started using less compression and limiting than in the old analog era.

There were a lot of hybrids during the transition era. Digital masters to vinyl record, LOTS of analog masters converted to CD, Mobile Fidelity and a couple of other specialty audiophile record companies did some special recordings with NO masters. They set up the studio to feed the console output directly to a cutting lathe and made analog LP masters directly. Great sounding audio, but less than perfect performances generally, as there was no "fix it in the mix".

Telarc was one of the first recording companies to fully utilize the greatter dynamic range of the CD format and digital mastering, and they were considered very high end for sound quality.

 

We'll here is the deal in audio.I'm into high end audio.

cd's in a cheap cd player sounds better in cheap equipment.But in high end audio .A good turntable like VPI TNT like what I have will kill any audio cd.It has a sound stage depth side to side and it is very detailed.Of coase I use a tube phono stage.Now with a CD you here side to side but there is no depth.Ya there is no back ground noise with cd but it is harsh and brite sounding.With a cd there is also a phase shift caused from the 20 to 20000 wall.There is a reasince frequence that runs up to 20000 hz and bounces back down and rolls sound out of phase down to 15,000hz.and that is what causes the highs to be bright.

BUT you do have to spend a large lump of cash to make records sound good.Now dvd and Sacd sound awesome almost as good as records

 

I thought I'd heard them all. that's a new one. Do you have any links to that? I'd be interested in checking that out. Digital sampling simply plots points along the curve digitally; shouldn't introduce any kind of phase shift. And any minor phase shifting, if there is any, is no doubt less than the phase shift common to any speaker system in the crossover regions. (shrug)

As far as your tube preamp... lots of audiophiles prefer the sound of tubes. Tubes are warmer (slightly depressed high end) and have an added 2nd order harmonic distortion that sounds pleasing, but is less accurate to the recorded sound. Tube power amps also feature far less speaker damping, which will affect the sound some, but that wouldn't be a factor in a tube preamp. A matter of taste, not fidelity. They DO sound sweet with lots of music though.

As far as imaging and depth, that's more a factor of the original recording techniques and the speakers than the electronics.

(grin) Audio is more art than science, and people disagree on it endlessly.

 

What?

 

Audio voodoo. It's a cult far older than computer geeks. Don't worry about it.

 

Ted tedio in rochester had an artical on the phase shift in 16 but cd's.It was in Stereophile Mag.There are divices out there to correct it but get your check book out.And speaker cross overs will no do anything for phase shift.
In high end cd players and digital convertor they are starting to upsamle to 20 bit to help with the problem.
with a record or tube equiptment your starting out with a signwave witch is how sound in the real world hears things.Cd''''''''s start off as a square wave and has to be converted to a motified square wave and if you look at the squar wave at the higher frequence there is a spike and that spick is what rezinates up to 20,000 hz
I've had dozens of cd player and transport and da convertors.From Wadia to Linn and ya some sound ok but nothing toutches the old TNT turntable.Except 24 bit DVD or SACD sound really good.
For people into your average stereo cd's do sound better for the money
I don't want to rag on but This is something I've benn into for 20 years and did installes of high end audio.
GT I take it you must have been into this stuff also

 

I hate the world.

I just wrote a really cool reply to that... and then pressed backspace by mistake and lost it. ARGGHh

 

Sine wave/square wave is a huge oversimplification. One, we don't listen to sine waves (boring), all the audio signals we're interested in are very complex and generally spikey waveforms, and two, the digital equivalent isn't a square wave, it's a plot of points along the sine wave's shape, over 44 thousand points each second. D/A converter then reads that set of points, and converts that signal back to a true analog wave. Some A/D & D/A converters are better than others, but you don't feed a spikey squared off signal to your amplifier, you feed it a true analog waveform. So there's no square waves fed to your amplification circuit to trigger a spike, unless your feeding it a square wave test signal. If that spike is an artifact of the A/D conversion process itself, its component would be a part of the distortion component that is routinely tested and reported. As low as the distortion figures are for most all CD players, any suce should be at a totally inaudible level. Plus, a spike such as you're describing is not a phase shift, which is a time shift of the entire waveform, it's a distortion component. Where does the phase shift come in?

It's funny. When the first CD players hit the market, they were around $2,000.00 and a top drawer turntable was a few hundred. How things have changed. I've always been amused by the "high end" of the audiophile community. While there is some VERY good stuff up there, some of what gets discussed up there has little to no basis in reality. And that's been true since before I got involved in it. New theories come up, the enlightened buy into them, real engineers poke holes in them, and the enlightened go on believing in them. Are there still people putting green magic marker stripes around the edges of their CDs?
GT I take it you must have been into this stuff also[/QUOTE]
Since the mid-70s. Spent a weekend with a married cousin, and her hubby had what was for then a very good system. I've been around LIVE music all my life. Growing up we had piano, accordion, guitar, violin, clarinet, sax, and trumpet in the house, we sang and played together and with others, went to real concerts with real instruments (not just rock guitars). Hearing a reasonable semblance of REAL music coming out of speakers was a real joy. It still is.

 

Well I hope you all have perfect hearing and an acoustically perfect room to play it all in, otherwise, beyond a certain point it's going to do little if any good anyway.

Yeah, I too, went through all the stereo, quadraphonic (briefly); vinyl; tape, etc. revolution of the '60's and 70's era.

 

Still have pretty good ears for an old fart Phantom. I can still hear the 19 Khz while from a muted TV set, which ain't too shabby for an old dude.

And yes, as you sort-of mention, there's nothing perfect in the audio world. Room acoustics and speaker placement impact any system, FAR more than the minor differences in any electronics specs, and can make a good speaker sound a lot less good.

I enjoy good sound, but have to live within a budget. I don't go crazy with it.