Sound quality change when sending .wav from 8-track to laptop

[Ichor]

So I'm pretty new to recording--very new to digital recording--and I'm not sure where my problem lies. I was testing out my equipment by recording acoustic guitar and vocals and going through the whole mixing process. I used one Shure SM57 mic to record onto a Fostex MR-8. The tracks sounded great (well, they sounded loud and clean, I won't go into my vocal abilities). Then I dumped the .wavs onto my laptop (Dell Inspiron 5100, 2.4Ghz, 512MB RAM, blah blah blah) and when I tried listening to them I could barely hear them, even with the computer's volume was all the way up. Then I tried loading them into Cool Edit Pro and raising the volume in there. I could get them just about loud enough to hear, but that caused some distortion on the guitar track which wasn't there on the Fostex. I don't know how exactly to describe it, some sort of static sound that happened intrmittently. Like it was raised to a volume level that it shouldn't have been raised to, yet was still fairly quiet.

Also, as a test I dumped .wavs from the MR-8's sample song onto my laptop and had no problems with volume or sound quality. Maybe I'm just not recording loud enough? But I thought I was.

[RideTheCrash]

I'll just give my 2 cents here. Are you running from your Fostex to your line in on your soundcard? Check the line in input level, because if it's too low you get a lower signal coming in. Then if you try to normalize it in Cool Edit, you raise all those nice sounds of hum, hiss, buzz, whatever.

[Ichor]

Well, it connects through a USB port. Not sure if there's any level I can adjust on that. I guess I'll take a look.

[KokaineWhite]

I was having this same problem with my Boss BR-8 mixer. Here's what you should do...

First, double click the speaker on the bottom right side of your screen. Go to recording, and uncheck all of the options except the USB port (or whichever you're using). Set the volume of this source between the 3rd and 4th lines.

When you record using your mixer, make sure that your vocals hit around -4 dB or higher. The PEAK light should light when you hit your loudest sounds.


At -4 dB sounds, you shouldnt have any problem with that quality anymore... I get exceptional quality with a shitty ass soundcard from this way.


I registered at this site just to help you, feel great. lol

[BennisHahn]

Well, you don't want the peak light to come on when you hit your loudest notes or else you are distorting the signal. You always want to keep it just under the peak line.

-Bennis