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Andy Murray · Posts: 23

This is a newbie-type question.

I have bought CE2000 and installed it on my 5-year old Pentium (One) 150Mhz system. I have 64 Mb RAM and had the motherboard upgraded to support a 10 Gb disk, running Win95B. At the time of the upgrade, the only concerns were word processing, email, browsing, and a very limited budget! Of course, the sound card that came with this jewel is an SB with a noise floor of about -42 db!

Now I am trying to convert 100+ old cassette recordings to CD, but I have to record them in CE through that awful card. CoolEdit does eliminate a lot of the noise before it starts to introduce noticable (even to me) artifacts.

Apparently the Sound card I need is something like the Midiman 2496, for about $Cdn 240. I could manage that, but then I'm told that I would need a much better processor and at least Win98. So now I'm thinking I'll have to put off this project for a year or so until I can afford a new PC. I don't mind waiting (overnight, sometimes) for transforms on my slow machine, but I'd like to be able to record without adding so much extra noise from the soundcard.

My question, at last, is this: were there no sound cards around 3-5 years ago that would run on my current system, that have/had a decent noise floor? I only want to be able to record stereo from cassettes and LPs, I'm not a musician.

-- Andy

BCS · Posts: 3

You should be able to get pretty good results from the card you have based upon what you are intending to transfer ... both cassettes and LPs have fairly high noise floors and I suspect that you may be getting 'noise' from your input volume settings on the SB card or from the input device itself (stereo system you are recording from). Check your input settings on the SB card, making sure that you turn off all inputs other than the line device you will be using ... if that does not eliminate the noise, then disconnect the input device from the sound card to see if that is causing the noise. A further suggestion would be to purchase an old SB AWE 64 card (ISA) for your system. I have one in my system and it generates less than -50db of noise ... not the greatest but more than acceptable for your project.

rogier · Posts: 90

It depends on your recording methods.Try to connect your sb input to the headphone connector of your tapedeck,this works verry well for me

Andy Murray · Posts: 23

Thanks for the suggestions, folks. My tape deck doesn't have a headphone jack, and the jack on my amp/receiver sometimes has wierd noise ("crosstalk" from the tuner?). But in any case I tried BCS's suggestion and confirmed that the noise (-42 db left, -46 db right) is coming from the sound card. I have to believe that if I can significantly reduce that input noise level I will be able to remove more of the remaining noise in the recorded wav file using CE2000's NR. Right now, the most NR I can apply before getting artifacts is about 55%. A good improvement, but a lot of people here seem to be able to go to around 85%. (Yes, I've played with the other parameters too).

-- Andy