SCOUG-HELP Mailing List Archives

<< Previous Message << >> Next Message >>

Date:	Sat, 5 Apr 2003 13:16:32 PST8
From:	"J. R. Fox" <jr_fox@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Re: Vinyl to CD | other-than-mainstream gear

Content Type: text/plain

=====================================================
If you are responding to someone asking for help who
may not be a member of this list, be sure to use the
REPLY TO ALL feature of your email program.
=====================================================

Peter wrote:

> > Those are not ordinary cables.
> > They're, beeeg, thick honkin' cables.
>
> Those are the worst kind. Too much capacitance. Your high end will
> droop.

My high end is in enough trouble as it is. {Rimshot.}
If you say so. I only note that the celebrated "MIT" and some other very expensive cables were of that
high-gauge persuasion.

> As long as you are happy with what you have recorded, that's great.
> After all, that's the whole idea.

For the most part, I have been. And I'm quite particular when it comes to discernible
defects on a recording.

> > > If the speakers were too loud we
> > > would get ringing feedback on the discs.
>
> > This has never been a factor, in my experience.
> > My speakers (indeed the amp driving them) are OFF
>
> How do you monitor what you are doing? How do you know if there's a
> skip?

A terrific invention you may have heard of, called . . . Headphones ! I have 'em
(sometimes) on a 25 ' extension cable, so I don't need need to hover nearby. Usually I
don't need to monitor anything like the entire side or cut -- the discs were carefully selected
at the time I got them, and the playback very rarely skips; I'm mostly concerned about staying
on top of the Record Levels, in case something has an unusually wide dynamic range, or some
passages that tend to peg on the high frequencies.

> Good. You have isolation.

More than you might suppose. I can only imagine what it would be if I resided in S.D.

> > Does the signal even pass through those sound chips ?
>
> Last time I checked it did. The analog sound wave goes to the sound
> chip where a circuit called an Analog-to-Digital Converter ("A/D")
> measures it 44,100 times every second. These measurements are what is
> stored in the digital data file.
>
> These sound chips have lots of different qualities. Distortion.
> Noise. Jitter. The number of low-order bits which are accurate. The
> better the chip, the better the measured quality. If you are happy with
> the laptop's sound, then use it.

No laptop yet, and this doesn't seen to add to the reasons for getting one. There are some
fancier sound cards (or at least there were), but not the kind you could put into a laptop,
I think.

> Some folks have added a dedicated cd-burner

> > audio-deck to their music systems.
>
> I looked at these about a year ago. Aside from the packaging you still
> have the same considerations. The weakest link is always the sound
> chip.

I suspect we've only really heard of the few mainstream ones. There are usually
other exotic models of such gear in existence, that you might only find out about
in the pages of (for example) The Absolute Sound. This is by no means an
endorsement of what they review or how they review it, just a statement that these
things exist, and are potentially worth investigating.

To some extent, I'm seeing a situation not unlike this as my survey of flat-panel LCD
monitors nears a conclusion. The finalists I have come up with are ones you are *not*
going to be able to see at Frys or CompUSA or Micro Centre. But I've checked out
the Sony's, the NEC's, the ViewSonics etc., which you _can_ see at those places, and
found them lacking, for my purposes.

Jordan

=====================================================

To unsubscribe from this list, send an email message
to "steward@scoug.com". In the body of the message,
put the command "unsubscribe scoug-help".

For problems, contact the list owner at
"rollin@scoug.com".

=====================================================

Return to [ 05 | April | 2003 ]

SCOUG, Warp Expo West, and Warpfest are trademarks of the Southern California OS/2 User Group. OS/2, Workplace Shell, and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.