Severe distortion recording on Delta Audiophile 2496 both analog and SP/DIF inputs

Blue Jinn

Rider of the ARPocalypse
Hello,

I know, old technology, but there's a method to my madness.

Setup: 2.4GHz 512MB RAM, XP.

I get distortion on playback when recording from both the analog and SP/DIF inputs (taking that from a DAT deck) The distortion is happening going in, as I exported to wav and checked it out on my laptop. It also distorts on playback from within Audacity before exported to another format. It's an old (2004) box, but I do everything OTB, and only want to use the box for mixdown, a little editing and fades in audacity and burning final CD. It's dedicated to music only. So for running a two channel Delta card, no internet, Audacity, Cakewalk 9, it's plenty powerful.

I've turned off the internal card in BIOS, moved the card to a new slot, re-installing the latest (XP) drivers, bumping DMA buffers to 512. The only way I can monitor is by using "Monitor Mixer" for input. I'd like to use Audacity, as again, I'm only using the box as basically a two track tape deck, so I'm not asking a whole lot of the hardware here.

Any and all suggestions appreciated.
 
First things first, as a process of elimination. What kind of levels are you recording? In the analog world 0dBVU is the target, and that translates to about -18dBFS in the digital world (varying between -12dBFS for some 16 bit systems down to about -20dBFS).

Second, can you post a sample so we could analyze it? Use the MP3 upload function so I can download it and look at the waveform. Or use some other option that allows downloading.
 
Since both the digital and analogue signal are distorted that would point to a fault in the 2496 card or the source. Can you separately listen to the output of the DAT machine?

Assuming you can prove the source ok that leaves the card or some weird driver ***t! Can you get the DAT signal into the laptop? Can you re-enable the internal card in the DTop and try that? Do you have another analogue source to test with? A CD player, phone?

Dave.
 
Hi,

Weird, but it *seems* to work ok recording into Cakewalk 9.

Here's a screenshot of the M-Audio panel:

screen.JPG

And here's a snapshot of what's going on in Audacity. The waveform looks "clipped" ?? on the negative edge.

screen2.JPG


Here's a sample of the distorted recording exported from Audacity at 128 mp3:



And exported from Cakewalk.

 
Since both the digital and analogue signal are distorted that would point to a fault in the 2496 card or the source. Can you separately listen to the output of the DAT machine?

Assuming you can prove the source ok that leaves the card or some weird driver ***t! Can you get the DAT signal into the laptop? Can you re-enable the internal card in the DTop and try that? Do you have another analogue source to test with? A CD player, phone?

Dave.
[MENTION=89697]ecc83[/MENTION]

I can monitor the output from the board, both going into the 2496 and from the board itself. Same from the DAT recorder. Both Audacity and Cakewalk will allow me to monitor going in, which sounds fine, just whatever is being "printed" is distorted. (Except now CW seems to be OK after I swapped PCI slots, so maybe the issue is a configuration problem in Audacity....)
 
It sounds like a data corruption problem. Swapping slots was a good idea. Perhaps you could try different drivers such as the stock Windows sound driver, ASIO4ALL, the correct ASIO driver for the hardware etc.
 
It sounds like a data corruption problem. Swapping slots was a good idea. Perhaps you could try different drivers such as the stock Windows sound driver, ASIO4ALL, the correct ASIO driver for the hardware etc.

I have to compile Audacity in order to use ASIO drivers, but I'll give that a shot. I'm also going to give Wavasour a try. I like the Audacity interface though as there's not a whole lot of clutter, and I can see what's being "printed."

Thanks again. I'll report back here if I have any success in case anyone else has a problem with Audacity. Also if I have any luck compiling with ASIO support. It's been a long time since I've gotten that far under the hood.
 
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