I have much material on reel to reel tapes that I want to copy to my computer's sound card for the purpose of putting the material on CDs. I will use the line-out from my reel to reel (Sony TC-755). Can you tell me what type of plug goes into the sound card? In case that is not a standard plug, my sound card is a SB Live! 1024 Digital Sound Card. The computer is a Dell 8200 with a Pentium 4 processor. Thank you very much.
Joe

To connect your deck to your sound card, all that you need is a simple 1/8" stereo phone plug to stereo RCA Jack adapter that you can purchase at Radio Shack. However, if you are looking to get fantastic sounding CDs this way, then you are likely to be dissapointed with the results.

The TC-755 is a great deck, and has the ability to make some very good sounding recordings, when it is properly calibrated. Unfortunately most computer sound cards do not make fantastic conversions and most computer burners have pretty high jitter. There are several other factors that are working against you in this environment, but I'm not going to get into these here.

Yes, this method will certainly work, but in my experience it is possible to make better sounding dubs from a really good cassette deck (like a Nak), than it is by using a typical PC. Truly great sounding CDs are surprisingly hard to make.

I spent a year working through all sorts of these various issues before I finally achiieved truly superb results with my conversion process. Now I have a busness where I will do this sort of thing for customers. So far every one of my customers has been completely blown-away by the sound quality of the resulting CDs created using my process.

Hello,

I too have attemped this by using my Philips CD burner and a CD-RW-DA disc. Then, take the CD to my computer, and by using Sound Forge 7.0 software, I trim any beginning dead space and any trailing dead space from the sound track (stereo of course).

It is time consuming but I have been very pleased with the results. I guess the secret is using the Philips Digital Audio CD burner instead of the computer to do the recording. The sound card never comes into play. By using the RW disc, I can then erase the CD and use it again to do more.

When the audio track is done, I use the CD burner in the computer to make a DA disc and then I have it.

My turntable is a Stanton with a digital output. That works very well also because I can go directly digital into the Philips CD burner and make the CD-RW-DA. Again, taking it to the computer and doing the editing. Sound Forge even has the ability to remove clicks and pops to a certain degree. The end result isn't the greatest but what a difference it makes when converting a 78 RPM record to digital!

Now by the method that I use, I never use the sound card in the computer. Has anyone else don this? If so, I would love some input.

Don

Don,

I definitely think that your method should work somewhat better than the usual soundcard route because your Phillips unit is specifically optimized for creating a clean 16 bit, 44.1 kHz signal.

Sound cards live in an extremely noisy environment, and are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to cleanly digitizing. Furthermore, they are simply NOT optimized for creating 16bit/44.1kHz signals. Most have very poor quality clocks with high jitter content, that make the cards significantly lose low-level signal resolution. And worst of all few, if any, have anti-aliasing filters built in! Pass in a 23 kHz sine-wave from a function generator, into most sound cards, and you will see an clearly aliased signal appear in your digital output (this is very bad)!

Frankly, I'm betting that your initial RW disk probably sounds a bit better than the disk that your computer outputs. While editing the recording, and filtering your signal like that like that on the computer is pretty neat, it unfortunately is not a lossless process, unless you happen to have an exceptionally low-jitter burner inside your computer.

Now, assuming that you are running a system that has good stereo imaging to begin with (this may be an entirely flawed assumption): then I'll bet that if you give the two disks a critical listen, and closely compare the sound of the original and edited disks, that you'll discover that your stereo "sound-stage width" has collapsed noticeably from the original RW to the edited disk. On some burners, the resulting output can be so badly compromised as to almost sound like going from Stereo to Mono, but this effect varies greatly depending upon the quality of the burner used.

I use a professional outboard AtoD converter to do my digitizing, which yields results that are substantially better than using even the best sound cards. And when I finally go to burn the CDs, I write them using the very lowest jitter burner ever made (sorry, but they don't make these units anymore). There are many other important optimizing factors involved in my process too but, suffice it to say that, the end result really sounds quite amazing.

What outboarrd DA converter and CD burner do you use ?

A good source for advice and software to convert from analog sources (vinyl and tape) to digital is enhancedaudio.com. I bought their basic software package years ago and still haven't explored all of the abilities. It can remove all kinds of noise, both impulse (scratches and pops) and hum as might be found on tape recordings. It can find the locations between cuts, put hem into proper format for digital and can add harmonics to the cuts to make them sound as if they were played on a tube amplifier. I'm sure their newest version is better yet. I can't say enough to praise this company and it's product

I'm willing to bet You do not have master tapes but probably just recorded tapes and your needs are not so critical to require a full blown high end process. I used Audio cleaning lab ($40) and My cheap ($300) computer I got at a computer show with a built in sound card in the motherboard. I just oversampled, turned the reel to reel on and captured the whole side and saved the file. I also recorded some 15 speed tapes on a 7 speed deck and just adjusted the time using the software. Yea the D/A's are not as good but It's not critical.

Thanks to all of you for your input!

I'll second Fred's post of 2+ years ago about EnhancedAudio.com products. I've been using DC6 to restore some historical magnetic audio tapes and have had good results. I've not had a chance to try DC7, which I've recently purchased, but expect it will not disappoint.

I'm having a great time transferring my music into my Mac. My turntable is plugged into the amp as usual, and I've got a cable from there (2 RCA plugs) to the Mac going in on a 3.5mm stereo jack. I record either into Garageband, which comes free with the Mac, or sometimes I use Audacity, which is also free if you want to google it. Both these applications allow me to edit easily and EQ the music as well. Great! and no software to buy.