PC Soundcards

Jack

I have tried several cards as I am in the same position as yourself i.e. archiving both vinyl and cassette tapes and would hole Hartley recommend the midi man 24/96 audiophile used at line level, I have seen them on ebay recently in the states for silly money $176 inc postage to the uk with some one called the midi-store I believe the have a web site ( dot com ) .

Yes, the M-Audio (formerly Midiman) Audiophile 2496 is very good. I laughed out loud when I did a comparison against my Sound Blaster. The A/D convertors work really well.

There's also software that you can get (Audio Grabber?) that will automatically scan your record, and try to figure out where the tracks start and stop. It saves you the trouble of doing this manually. I would probably still do it myself with CoolEdit 2K, but you might be interested yourself.

-=> Mike Hanson <=-

Hi Jack,

I've found the sound quality of my SB live 5.1 to be remarkably good. I've just installed an MAudio Audiophile card and am dissappointed that it shows very little improvement over the SB [which is 1/4 the price]. The SB line input levels are controled through the normal windows vol controls, and they balance up nicely. The Audiophile card [MA] uses proprietory swr program which is complicated to set up and creates what appears to be a sophisticated mixer this, however, is next to useless as it has no pre-fade control of the line input, therefore, there is no input level control if you are coming st out of line/tape out of your amp. The only way I can get a level is to come out of pre-amp out and use the pre-amp volume control to adjust for a level. This means re-wiring the hifi every time i want 2 record, which is unacceptable. I've not managed to get spdf/optical in/out to work the handbook is of very little help. The card also produces a high level of background noise.

The MAudio card is highly regarded by musicians and other music makers, but it's not suitable for use in a hifi setup.

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I've not managed to get spdf/optical in/out to work

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With S/PDIF, you have to assign a master and a slave for the sync to work. This forces the destination to use the source's clock. The setting is on that proprietary control panel, on the "Hardware Settings" tab. Look for "Master Clock", and set this to "S/PDIF" in. Then you'll also have to specify the sample rate that you're getting from your source (also set on that same tab).

When you're outputting from the card, you may have to fiddle with the Professional vs. Consumer option, depending on the external device. I've always used Professional, but my output is connected to a Yamaha VS-880 HD Recorder.

As to background noise, I've found the Audiophile 2496 to be excellent. However, I haven't compared it to the SB 5.1.

Finally, I've occasionally run into that problem with the pre-amp input levels, but I've always been sending it from a separate pre-amp that has the ability to boost output levels. I'm about to try it recording some records for a friend, though, so I may have the same problems. In that case, I'll probably just use my VS-880 as a level booster, and then send it as a digital signal to my Audiophile card.

-=> Mike Hanson <=-

There's something wrong here, having just replaced the awful-sounding (in comparison) SBLive with the M-Audio 24/96 it's a huge leap forward.

The SBLive only works well when recording at 48k (and even then it sounds pretty dire) but at 44.1k it does on-the-fly sample rate conversion and is measurably and sonically worse.

The noise thing is equally confusing, the M-Audio is very quiet indeed, but be wary that the SBlive mutes audio if the input sliders are turned right down, giving misleadingly low noise measurements. With inputs shorted the M-Audio is much quieter. If I get a moment I'll post a couple of noise plots for comaprison.

The M-Audio is a little more confusing, but this comes from it's higher versatility - as Mike says you have to choose the clock source when using external SPDIF, and I also find the patchbay / router a bit confusing and the manual is poor.

To get the level adjustment, select the M-Audio Monitor / Mixer as the source in your recording application, then the level controls will work.

For the original question, I use an external A-D (M-audio Flying Calf) and feed 44.1k 24bit SPDIF data into the PC from another room. This is then padded to 32bit in the recording applicaton for any editing, then converted back to 16bit for final output. The Terratec is apparently an excellent card, although it's gaming features made me nervous after the 'Creative' advertsing of the SBLive, the final decision seems to come down to whether you want optical or electrical SPDIF i/p - only the Terratec has the former and this is potentially a better solution for feeding data over long distances, long electrical cables make things worse, whereas a long optical cable can actually sound better than a shorter one.

This approach with the external A-D gets critical signal circuits away from the noisy PC, and some recordings of vinyl I did at the weekend sound better than the re-issued CD's!

Andy.

Andrew I must say I don’t think there is anything wrong here about par for the course on a naim forum, the very fact that a sound blaster wont do bit for bit copies and re samples every thing it handles are two of the reasons why it sounds I was going to say crap but that would be unfair as it is a multimode card and it’s support for games is without parrel, The midi mans HARDWARE mixers soft ware is to be fair straight forward but by no means easy to use I grant you, also I must be using a different card to some others as mine does not have an optical input only s/pdf, I can also adjust the input level via the line in on it, I will comment that’s it’s sensitivity is the usual i.e. to low, but that’s the great thing about standards, the noise level of the card is in my system is ( what noise ) really, and for single events i.e. recording for vinyl via line in I recon it would take the Pepsi challenge and win, to suggest it’s not suitable for use in a hi-fi set up is not correct at all, as can be seen a little time reading the manual and setting up is required, but all in all it’s very good, and I think at a barging price now.

Stuart

Thanks for all the input, I think the general consensus is that the M-Audio card is highly rated. Not much feedback on the TerraTec.

I did look at the Flying Calf but it's well beyond the price of the M-Audio card.

Without wanting to open a completely different thread, what is the general view on the quality of the final CD recording based on whether this is completed via PC (M-Audio card) or via a dedicated CD writer such as the Pioneer or Marantz (at roughly same cost £150 - £200)

I have not had great success with the clean up utilities in products like Cooledit so I am not really intending to clean up the PC recording before writing to CD. Regardless I feel the PC will be a lot more flexible and I would generally prefer that to a dedicated recorder.

Having said that, if there's a massive quality difference I would forego that flexibility.

Appreciate any of your experiences.

Jack

Jack

I have had very positive experiences with the Terratec EWX 24/96. Installation was hassle-free and the software works fine (WIndows XP Home on a new 2GHz PC with 256 MB RAM). I recorded lots of the Proms on R3 over the summer, with Rotel TU-260/II going into the Terratec's analogue input. Line out is to a JVC micro system for monitoring purposes, and even with that you can hear the difference between digitization at 16/44 and 24/96 - a convincing argument for the inadequacy of the CD format if ever there was one!

Dan

Re. dedicated CDR machines vs. PC-based approaches:

I started off with a cheap Philips CDR machine, and was pleasantly surprised at how reasonable it sounds. What made me get the Terratec and go the PC route was the 'ergonomic' factors more than sonic ones. If you're trying to record a live broadcast you get only one shot to put track increments in the right places, fade out at the end etc., and maybe I'm ham-fisted but I found it hard to get satisfactory results like that in real time. Much easier, and better results, when you stream to disk and then muck about at your leisure with CoolEdit to create separate tracks, add a couple of seconds of silence here and there, fade out the applause before the announcer interjects, etc.

BTW, I'm sure I've read somewhere that there are theoretical reasons why it is better to record at 24/96, then down-sample to 16/44 for dumping to CD. But NB the down-sampling takes ages, even on a reasonably fast PC. I must do a controlled expt one of these days to see if it's worth the bother.

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Quick question - doesn't changing the sampling from XX bit to 30 bit then back to 16 bit not cause problems with quantization errors?

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What really requires care is changing the sampling rate, from 44.1 to 48 and back, for instance.

Representing 16 or 24 bit samples in 32 bits should be transparent, I think it's quite often a floating point representation.

If you do any processing then more bits can required for intermediate results in order to avoid degradation when the output is truncated to 16 or 24 bits.

To do a proper conversion from 44.1 to 48 or vice versa probably requires 32, 48 or 64 bit processing.

(I used to know, but I've forgotten...)

Paul

Dan,

Sounds like the TerraTec is still an option then. I also recall seeing something about recording at 24/96 improving the sound, probably on the TerraTec site!

You didn't actually say whether or not the sound qulaity was any different on a like for like basis between PC and dedicated CDR.

Do you have a view on that please ?

Thanks

Jack

At the moment all I can say is that they're don't sound significantly different in terms of quality. Not quite comparing like with like though, as my hi-fi system tuner is an old analogue (in the sense of a needle and tuning scale rather than digital presets) Pioneer from the mid 80s (TX540L - inexpensive even back then), whilst for PC recording I use the Denon TU260/II. When I tried the latter in the hi-fi system I found that it is better at the frequency extremes, but that it has a more 2D soundstage and less 'atmosphere' than the Pioneer. This is particularly noticeable with live broadcasts from venues like the Albert Hall or Bridgewater Hall. Anyway, the Terratec seems to preserve the character of the Denon, and the Philips that of the Pioneer, so that means approximately a draw I guess. Without downsampling to 16/44 I think the Terratec would have a significant edge though!