Making Digital sound Anolog

[paulguitaylor]

I am a solo musician and record my own backing tracks for live performance.

The recording device is a Fostex MR16. For the most part, I record bass and drums directly into the Fostex from a Boss DR-880. Eventually I'll get into adding other instruments to my recordings.

After I have adjusted the levels on both the DR-880 and the Fostex and recorded the tracks, I record them directly into a Sony Mini-Disc recorder, using the stereo outputs on the Fostex.

This has worked out fine. The recordings are quiet and have a warm fat sound when played back live through my PA system. The down side to using a mini-disc rec/player in a live situation is that each disc only holds about 18-20 songs, depending.

So, I decided to record directly to my laptop in the same method. I came out of the outputs on the Fostex into the stereo phono input of the laptop and recorded them with Audacity.

Again the recordings were clean and quiet, but when played through my PA (from the laptop) they sounded much thinner than that of the Mini-Disc player. The bass tracks also seemed to swell as opposed to being punchy and tight.

To me, the Fostex/Mini Disc combination sounded more like analog, which is the sound I want. But, I also want the convenience of having all my tracks in one location for easy and quick access.

Obviously, I'm no recording genius so please pardon my ignorance. How do I get the sound quality I'm getting out of my mini-disc player, out of my laptop.

FYI, it's an inexpensive laptop...an Acer.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated...in the meantime, I will keep experimenting.

Thanks.

Paul

 

[bouldersoundguy]

The audio circuits built into a laptop are cheap and prone to mediocre sound. A decent USB or Firewire audio interface will likely do a better job recording and playing back than what comes with the computer.

 

[Armistice]

Paul

If you're using the stereo outs on your Fostex, you're converting your digital music to analogue.

If you're feeding this back into Audacity then you're re-converting it into digital using your laptop's A/D converters, which will be crap. Hence you're hearing a crap sound.

As the music is already in digital, you need to get it into your PC still in digital form and not do all these conversions, and then play it. You won't need Audacity either, just a file player of some sorts.

I'm not familiar with your Fostex, but there must be a way to interface it directly with the computer, rather than go via the stereo outs.

Cheers

 

[bouldersoundguy]

Looking at the Fostex site I see that you can connect the MR16 to a computer and transfer wave files via USB. Download the software from Fostex.

http://www.fostexinternational.com/docs/music_products/mr16hd.shtml

But that doesn't solve your main problem, record time. For that you may need an interface for the laptop.

 

[witzendoz]

Have you got the cables connected correctly? If the stereo out from the Fostex is somehow being summed to mono in the cabling this would explain a thin signal. Also standard computer sound cards are usually very poor especially on cheap lap tops.

Even one of these would sound better, we used one on a UK tour once to get out of trouble when a sound module died, we triggered the sounds that were stored in the lap top, and it sounded great through the PA.

Cheers
Alan

 

[dintymoore]

Like others have said, you need a USB audio interface. The added bonus would be that at gigs I'd rather depend on the USB jack on the Acer than the 1/8" headphone jack - they always screw up.

M-Audio, Behringer... there's a bunch of tiny USB interfaces out there. I see them on Craigslist all the time. I wouldn't be too particular about the brand.