so I guess I have to obsess about A/D converters now?

[groucho]

Well, I had a very sobering experience here. I recently went back to recording/mixing on tape with no computer, using a Tascam 488 and a 22-4 and I'm ecstatically happy. However, of course I still do have to get these tunes into the digital domain at some point if I want to share them with anyone.

Ok, no prob. Just connect the line outs from the 488 into my dinky little m-audio soundcard... hey, it's cheap but it does the job, I've always thought.

Then I listen to the mixdown on the DAW. And it sounds like absolute ASS. Harsh. Cold. Small. Irritating (and not just my extended guitar noodling I swear). I listen again on the 488. Beautiful. Round. Full. Yummy. DAW versionL absolute ASS.

OK, so I guess this is what all those "converter" threads were about that I skipped over in the past. Do I need to start spending gobs of dough now on some fancy conversion box? What do y'all who are recording on tape do?

 

[rob aylestone]

I suppose you need to do some experiments to work out what exactly is happening. I can't imagine what your list of superlatives means technically? I don't know what your 'round' means - Full? Yummy? Beautiful? To my ears clean, noise free, dynamic range, and oddly width, make me happy. Does my dynamic range = your full? Lots of harmonics and depth to strings might be your yummy?

Maybe just borrow or buy with return a different interface and see if you can capture whatever the essence is? Could it be your excellence is the absence of things that the digital reveals?

 

[TalismanRich]

This type of comment always makes me wonder what they are hearing and how their digital system is set up.

Everything that I've transferred in the past from my analog system to my computer via my Tascam interface has sounded identical to the source. I've even run the line out of my interface back to the full stereo system and swapped between the two sources, aligned as best as I can, and I was not able to detect a difference. This includes both frequency balance and spaciousness.

It certainly never turned an analog sourced transfer into anything even remotely like "ass".

 

[Farview]

You won't need to spend thousands on prism or anything like that, but you will need to get out if the bottom basement category.

For a long time now, the converters themselves haven't been the issue, it is the cheap analog circuitry leading to and away from the converters that makes the difference.

Most converter complaints and solutions you run into online are old information from 20 years ago that keeps getting repeated. Once you get away from the sub-$200 two channel interfaces, you should be doing pretty well.

 

[ecc83]

I am with Rob and Rich, no analogue conversions I have ever done have sound differently from the original.
But " tiny cheap M-A sound card"? The only M-A 'cards' I know of were the Delta series and I had several 2496 cards and they were fine, used for digitizing the output of a 15ips Teac A3440.

If you are in UK Grouch you can borrow my NI KA6 and if that sounds 'ass' there is something wrong with your setup!

Dave.

 

[groucho]

Thanks for the input guys. Yeah, I'm hoping that maybe the issue is just my kinda budget level interface. And that getting - as you say, "out of the basement" might help.

The slightly disturbing thing is that I don't recall ever thinking there was anything particularly displeasing about this M-audio card or the recordings I made with similar ones during the years where I was 100 percent digital - but now that I've been working with tape again for a bit I'm hearing things very differently.

I feel like my ears are slowly remembering what sound used to be, and suddenly I'm noticing things in the digital realm I wasn't hearing when I *stayed* in the digital realm for the whole thing.

I haven't yet become one of these crazed analog zealots but I'm definitely well on the way...

Could it be your excellence is the absence of things that the digital reveals?

Well this is the ongoing question that seems to never be fully resolved: why do so many of us perceive analog as sounding so much better than digital? It could very well be that things are "revealed" in digital that are masked in a more pleasing way when using tape. That seems plausible to me.

But I'm glad to hear y'all are able to transfer to digital without hearing a difference - that's reassuring. I'm hoping this particular issue is less a "digital vs analog" issue and more an interface issue.

 

[bouldersoundguy]

Yeah, I suspect there's something up with the interface. It has been a long time since any but the cheapest interfaces made much of a sonic imprint on the audio. My old M-Audio MobilePre USB was a bit sus. I think the left and right channels were not perfectly in sync (offset by a sample or something).