414mkii mixdown to bites??

[k1enneth]

I have had my Portastudio for 6 months now, along with a Alesis Drum machine and midiverb iii...so I'm getting the hang of all their capabalities. I mixdown 4 tracks plus the drum machine in stereo to my home pc, which has Sound Forge digital audio program. This is a permanent file incase my Master Tape is destroyed.
Upon playback thru the pc..or if I reinsert the stereo tracks back to the Portastudio to add vocals on the empty channels, I notice a "BAD COPY" or just digital processing from the software which sounds lame..thin...lacking depth. Does a DAT recorder provide better or worse processing than a PC software program?
Are digital bits for recording all created equal?

 

[mikemorgan]

Analogue to digital

I assume you mix down from the cassette deck to the PC by way of your PC sound card with a 1/8th inch stereo plugin, right. Your soundcard then converts the audio output from cassette to bits by means of digital conversion. This first generation digital conversion is now sitting in your PC as a wave file. To play it back, your soundcard must reverse the process, now converting digital information back to analogue information. Your soundcard is definately the culprit of poor audio quality. It did a meager job of recording the analogue, and a meager job of reproducing it upon playback. You should look at buying a soundcard designed for audio reproduction. These can be had for as little as $125 for a full-duplex unit. If you get into a card designed with a 4X4 breakout box, you could send individual tracks back and forth from your cassette. Keep in mind, the digital convertors you use make all the difference when transfering analogue to digital, and back again.

 

[k1enneth]

quite right!

very accurate, the soundcard is a E-Mu duplex soundcard that is sold to fit in the bay of the PC. It came with E-Mu Audio Sound Production Studio...I thought is was a quality soundcard, I still believe it is. I was curious if DAT was subject to the same sound regeneration problems.