Hi, I am new to this forum and I also don't have much experience with any of this (guitar or recording). And my question is not related to guitar but to something else - I have some old family reel-to-reel tapes and I just got an old reel-to-reel recorder/player that I hooked up to the PC (RCA output from the reel-to-reel via converter to line in connector on the PC). I am using SonicStage Mastering Studio to record the tape on my PC and that works ok - the only problem is that the digitazied recording is somehwat distorted from the original. It looks like the input level is sometimes too high and gets cut off. SonicStage has a very simple input level adjustment tool that did not help much. I was looking around on the Internet and I found some articles suggesting an "equaliser plugin". Would "equaliser plugin" increase the quility of the digitized sound? If so, what kind of equaliser would you suggest (what brand?)? Is there any other plugin I should use?
MANY THANKS, LUCIA
I don't know about that, but I recently read something about baking reel tapes for 7 hours at 130 F in order to improve sound quality.
I haven't tried it, so don't take it as gospel. 8)
check out my website for good recording/playing info
Do you not have a volume control on the tape player? If you do then that's the way to go. Recording then equalizing won't help with the distortion you're getting. When you record it into the computer and your peaks are clipped your recording will lose the peaks in the signal. You can't add them back in. If you adjust the recording level you may be able to fix it. That depends on whether the volume is adjusted before or after the clipping occurs. I'd poke around with the levels a little more if I were you.
A preamp would let you drop the level, and probably let you improve the sound a little, but that would entail buying a preamp. Unless you've got a whole lot of tapes, I'm guessing you don't want to do that.
If you can't find a way to get them recorded without distortion then you could try applying a limiter effect to your distorted signal. That would clip the signal a little more, but hopefully in a slightly less grating way than the overdriven sound card did. You'd want to put the limiter cutoff a little below the maximum amplitude of the signal.
hey, I was interested to see this topic as I've probably spent the best part of nearly 8 months converting vinyl, cassette tapes and some reel-to-reel to digital audio files.
I've used SonicStage with mixed results, as well as other titles such as Sound Forge, but I've stumbled across one that is easy and simple to use and has given me the best results so far. I now use WavePad Sound Editing Software – you can get a free download here http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/
I've also bee recommended to use Audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ) but I haven't used it as I've had no need to stop using WavePad,
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