Posted by Rick Denney on May 07, 2001 at 21:56:21:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Minidisc or DAT? posted by Larry Zaidan on May 07, 2001 at 20:49:40:
Cool Edit is a digital sound file editor that will let you edit the recording once you get it into the computer. It is inexpensive and wonderful--there's a link on my first long post in this thread.
I have experimented with my setup over the weekend, and I'm quite sure that the analog step from the minidisc to the sound card has no audible sonic effect. Even using my basement as a studio, my recorded silence is about -70 dB, peak reading (which means even lower than that on average), after having been recorded into the computer. As long as I remember to turn off the AC, the process has just enough noise to make it sound like a room and not dead air.
My basement is too dry, however, having no reverb (and, nicely, also no echo). I added reverberation using the reverb filter in Cool Edit, and the result sounds like someone recorded me on the stage of a concert hall. The acoustical effect was similar, but without as much reverberation, as the Pokorny excerpt recording. Too bad the player in my test can't carry a tune in a bucket.
By the way, none of the portables have a digital output, except for the first-generation models that are no longer available. It's too bad, but it isn't a problem. The reason you guys (and the guy with the DAT rig) don't get as good a result as a commercial CD is because you don't record it in a studio with the perfect microphone placement, and (with utmost intended respect) you don't have the experience that the pros have for tweaking that digital file. For example, I normalized my sound files to 0 dB, which has the effect of making the loud parts a bit louder without changing the soft part--it just expands the dynamic range. You can't tell it was done, but the listening level of my recording has the same sparkle as the commercial CD's. Perhaps I shouldn't do it, because it isn't strictly realistic. It's a bit like pumping up the color saturation in the photographs used for calendars and postcards. But they do that in part because exaggeration is the only way the two-dimensional can imitate the three-dimensional, visually or aurally.
Rick "who believes not much of what we hear on commercial CD's is completely factual--but it is representative" Denney