Re: [Gwc-general] restoration of dynamic range in vinyl recordings?

[John C. <ci...@pu...>]

I have noticed this too, even on old Beatles LPs, which I wouldn't 
expect to be compressed like that.  At first thought I had the 
gain set too high. Not so.
You'd think with CDs and their wide dynamic range, that things are 
better now. However the recent trend seems to be to record as high 
as possible, with the attitude that louder is better, even 
approaching the clipping level. Go figure!

By the way, my card, which is a Sound Blaster with the ES1371 
chipset, has a nasty "extra" input level control called Input 
Gain.  I didn't see it at first, and though my line input level 
was at a reasonable level and the meters were well below zero VU, 
everything was clipped.  Input Gain seems able to overload the 
first stage even before reaching the regular controls. After 
finding out about that, I was OK.

John


David Black wrote:
> James-
> 
> Can't remember exactly, but it's fairly low end "Allegro".  I use it 
> because it has a better SNR on the input than the Creative SBlive! it 
> replaced, by 5-10 dB or so.
> 
> I am old enough to at one time have had just vinyl in my music 
> collection, and thought they sounded pretty good back then.  But 
> alongside CDs, I really hear the difference.  I was listening to the 
> analog output of the turntable/preamp, could hear it and see a curious 
> "brick wall" max level on the VU meters.  This with several 
> pop/rock/fusion records produced in the early 80s.
> 
> Regarding my card: I have run tests on the A/D portion for distortion, 
> freq. response and linearity.  It's far from perfect but definitely not 
> responsible for much of the hard compression I could see.   It does show 
> some mild compression at the last 2 dB or so before the digital "0 VU" 
> mark but not enough to explain the above.
> 
> With all the great stuff we can do these days using DSP in a 
> general-purpose computer, I am just trying to make the most of those old 
> records that still sound good but with a little computational help, can 
> sound even better.
> 
> Dave
> 
> James Tappin wrote:
> 
>> What sound card do you have? I recall having a similar sort of thing with
>> a Trident-based Hoontech card, where anything that went above about 
>> +/-15k
>> ADU's was squashed out so that it was virtually impossible to get a true
>> saturated sample. Whereas with the Envy24 based card I now use it just
>> hits the buffers at full speed.
>>
>> James
>>
>>  
>>
> 
> 
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