[MacDV] Re: A-D conversion in DV camcorder... any good?

[Scott Baldwin]

Sean and Terry,

The audio converters on the Sony are probably not much different than 
the converters on the Mac. Compared to a good stand alone converter, 
both will be inferior,  but not necessarily bad.  It is impossible to 
"quantify"  the difference in quality.  In the audio world the 
difference in converters is subjectively determined through listening 
tests, not scientific analysis, just as the difference in video 
converters is done.  However the difference in quality between 16 bit 
(the Mac and Sony) and 24 bit (most current pro converters) is usually 
considered obvious.

My suggestion is to try each method with the same material, and see if 
you prefer one over the other. Try a couple of different songs, but 
something soft and quiet will give you a better idea as to the 
difference in quality than something loud.  I suspect you will not find 
too much difference.

Personally I think staying with the Mac's converters going into Peak is 
a better method.  Peak is designed to handle only audio, and you may 
actually want to do a little audio editing once you have digitized it. 
(ie Normalization or noise removal)

If you were to consider an external audio converter, in my opinion( I 
am an audio professional) the inexpensive consumer USB converters are 
no better than the Mac's.

If you don't already own Peak, a good software choice is Montage. 
(http://www.arboretum.com)  This is an excellent video program, 
(everything you wish imovie was) but it has good audio editing 
capabilities as well.  You can use the Ray Gun plugin with this 
software.  Ray Gun is a plugin that is specifically designed to clean 
up vinyl recordings.

Good luck,

Scott


On Saturday, April 26, 2003, at 10:01 AM, BigScanner.com wrote:

> Anxiously awaiting someone to respond to this Sean.
> Good questions.
>
> Terry
>
> <http://www.bigscanner.com>
>
>
> On 4/26/03 9:00 AM, "Sean" <spenney at stemnet.ca> wrote:
>
>> I was reading in MacWorld magazine how the audio in ports on the Mac 
>> may
>>
>> not be as high quality as third party options (although the article
>> doesn't quantify how much the Mac audio-in ports are inferior) and now
>> I'm wondering.
>>
>> I'm using my old, trusty Beige G3 with the built-in A/V card running 
>> OS
>> 9.2 and sometimes OS X 10.2.5. I want to digitize some of my old LP's.
>>
>> What I've done in the past is to connect the turntable to a pre-amp 
>> and
>> into the audio-in RCA jack of the Beige G3 and record it directly to
>> Peak or something like it.
>>
>> If the analogue-digital converter in the Mac is inferior to others,
>> would the following setup produce a better result:
>>
>> Connect the turntable to the pre-amp's stereo inputs.
>> Connect to pre-amp's stereo outputs to the analogue stereo inputs on 
>> my
>> Sony DV camcorder.
>> Connect the DV camcorder to the Beige G3's via a third party FireWire
>> port.
>>
>> Now, I can play the LP, have Sony digitize it, and have iMovie import 
>> it
>>
>> *live* and then have iMovie extract the audio from this new clip and
>> save it as an AIFF file ready to be massaged and burned to a CD-R.
>>
>> My question: Will the Sony camcorder digitize the incoming analogue
>> signal better than the Beige G3's A/V card?
>>
>> Sean
>
>
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