On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 04:37:45PM -0700, Kent Shaw wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> As Mr Peet correctly pointed out there is no substitution for a
> knowledgeable and experienced recordist. And as an audio engineer
> inexperienced in the nuances and subtle details of birdcalls and nature
> sounds I would never assume I knew what was best without the input of
> the original recordist or someone experienced in the field. I do however
> stand behind my comments about a good quality soundcard and the importance
> of editing. I apologize if any feathers were ruffled.
The original poster was looking mainly for S/PDIF input. In this case, as far
as I
can tell, you just have to make sure that the card isn't using one of the
chipsets that
*always* resamples the input, like the Creative (SoundBlaster) cards. Of
course you'll
want good D/A for monitoring while editing/post-processing.
As far as editing ... this article/booklet by Bob Katz has some interesting
information
about preserving sound quality while working in the digital domain:
http://www.tcelectronic.com/media/katz_1999_secret_mastering.pdf
For example, I use Cool Edit Pro; once I make any amplitude changes, my
file is converted to 32-bit mode. Once that happens, I need to make sure
that I only convert back down to 16 bit (or any other shorter wordlength)
*once*, after all my other processing is done, so that I add dithering
noise only one time. You probably also want to listen to the results of
different dithering algorithms (settings) in your software to learn which is
the best for any particular recording.
There look to be a lot of other interesting articles here:
http://www.tcelectronic.com/TechLibrary
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