Noisy Soundcard Woes

  • Thread starter Thread starter AV-Boy
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AV-Boy

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Please be patient with a newbie (afraid I’ve made my first mistake already by originally posting this question in the Sonic Foundary Forum, where it seems there aren’t many readers). Here’s my situation:

Trying to record to my PC with Sound Forge XP 4.5 - have a deck connected to the line input of my soundcard and everything is pretty much working (I'm hearing music, creating files on the HD & burning to CDs that will play on my stereo, etc.). But I seem to have noise - looking at the meters in SF and they're showing input levels of -33 on both channels, with or without the deck connected to the sound card. I'm recording at 44.1, 16-bit, stereo. I've upped the sample rate in both record and playback in the Advanced Audio Properties Control Panel, but that hasn't helped. I expect the VU meters in SF should show no input level until I give it a signal (I may be expecting too much).

I’ve seen this problem described as the noise floor of the card, and I’m wondering how to remedy the situation. Will an inexpensive soundcard upgrade do the trick? Are all Soundblasters bad? I received a CompUSA gift certificate for x-mas; is anything I can buy there for under $100 (the more under the better) going to help me? I'm hoping to get a clean stereo signal into the PC so I can burn a CD that sounds more like it should...

Computer - Micron 300mHz PII w/192 meg RAM
Crappy soundcard - Creative AWE64
OS – Win 98

Thanks in advance for your help-
 
More than likely (actually, Way more than likely) your sound ard is the culprit. About the only thing you can do with what you have is to make sure that you have everything except the line input muted in your Windows mixer that could be contributing to the high noise floor. If the idleing noise is that high with nothing plugged in and you have everything muted except "line in", your sound card (and I suspect it is) is crap. Sorry. I have a low opinion of Sound Blaster cards in general but if you don't intend on doing a lot of high end, audiofile quality recording it should serve you well and I'm sure would be a step up from what you have now, IMHO.
 
I've never found the meters in SF to be all that great and have never seen them register zero. So don't worry about that. Watch them for clipping and use your ears for everything else.

Without knowing what the noise sounds like exactly, here are a couple things to look at before messing with the soundcard. First off could the noise be coming from the deck itself? How noisy is it? The other thing might be a DC Offset problem. There should be a setting in SF for DC Offset. Check the help file.

Though I'm not fond of Soundblaster stuff myself, for your needs it should work fine.
 
Track Rat's right...the card probably has a bad circuit or connection. There should be NO noise at any level. I don't know if Comp is carrying any dedicated recording cards yet. If not, perhaps you could pony up a few bucks for a more viable card and save the gift certificate for an upgrade of your memory, hard drive, etc. ?

http://www.zzounds.com/a--2676837/love.music?p=p.ECHMIA&z=1260930286671

http://www.zzounds.com/a--2676837/love.music?p=p.MDOAP2496&z=1260930286671

http://www.zzounds.com/a--2676837/love.music?p=p.THKMIMDD2&z=1260930286671

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/srs7...6110868705/search/g=home/detail/base_id/52845

http://www.buymicro.com/default2.cfm?loadcatdrill=vend&vendor_name=Turtle^Beach^Systems

Here are some options.
 
Thanks for the input so far guys.

Though I'd like to be able to pony up the $$ for a real recording card, I can't do so at this time. Just looked at the Sunday paper & noticed the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz on sale for $60 - sound like a worthwhile improvement over my AWE64?
 
the Santa Cruz has to be THE best consumer type card there is...pretty quiet (for the price) and sounds pretty decent...youd have to step up to a prosumer type card (Delta,Echo,Aardvark) to get considerably better quality than the SC.....
 
Thanks for your help guys. Think I'll have to settle for the Santa Cruz; I've got too many expensive hobbies to spend more right now. I'll resolve to purchase a more serious card when I replace this computer in a couple of years...
 
Mute all unused inputs (that >will< take your noisefloor down)

And only work at 16bit/48kHz. That's the native resolution of the SBLive (and the frAudigy). Anything other than 48kHz is being resampled and degraded in the conversions as you record.
 
So it's better to record at 48 and resample in Sound Forge before burning to CD than it is to record at 44.1?
 
maybe on those cards thats appropriate (im not sure)...but normally, 44.1 should be used unless you have a great re-sampling program....
 
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