| Home recording and general music post from the archived Yabb Recording Website Message Board. Some of the info here may be outdated but many of the audio recording and home studio tips are still good. Note: The only tags I made and attempt to convert are italics, bold, center and underline. So if you see some gibberish surrounded by brackets, just ignore it.
Recording Website Archived Yabb board Post
Febuary 2001 Yabb Message Board Archive
Subject: Mixing on my PC
by chris | 06/07/01 at 15:30:19
I have a reel to reel 8 track deck and a Mackie 1604 and I’m trying to mix down my music to my PC. I’ve tried this and the result sounds horrible. I have a feeling it is because of my sound card (I’m not sure what kind it is, it came with my HP computer). Is it most likely the soundcard that is causing the fidelity to suffer?
Subject: Re: Mixing on my PC
by xigaa | 06/07/01 at 18:14:19
I'm sure there are others with more knowledge, but my experience with soundcards is that they usually have 1/8" jack inputs. I think you'll have signal loss through that and may want to look into some kind of interface that can convert a TRS or XLR signal into USB or some other computer friendly signal.
There are also other soundcards with 1/4" and RCA inputs. Otherwise, I think you'll lose sound quality. Hope that helps.
:)
Subject: Re: Mixing on my PC
by Tim_Z | 06/07/01 at 22:58:50
Chris
That is exactly how I work, except I mix down from ADATs to PC, and I get excellent results. Good enough for serious CD releases. The quality of your A/D converters are very important. My first guess would be that your soundcard IS the culprit. Do you have an opportunity to test it with a better card? I would highly recommend the LynxONE card. It's converters simply sound much better than most other cards or external racks in its price range. I also have a Tango 24 rack set of converters, and the Lynx converters simply sound superior. Another good choice is the Card Deluxe, which I have heard good reviews of. Also the RME Digi 96 PST would be an excellent choice. Unfortunately, there really is no way to scrimp in this area. You may be able to get by with an SB Live, but you really should be doing your mixes at 24 bits before editing and mastering to CD.
I assume you have made sure that all your cords and connections are proper and in good working order.
What software are you mixing to?
Good luck with it.
TZ