Making your own 96Khz/24 bit recordings...

[maxg]

First day on the forum so a bit of background.

I have a portable PC with a DVD burner on it. I also have an external Soundblaster Audigy 2 USB soundcard connected in.

The Audigy came with a bunch of software including the ability to record at 96/24.

Being an inveterate player I decided to have a go at ripping a vinyl recording at this level and see what happens. I re-ripped at 44.1/16 and then compared the 2 using the outputs on said audio card.

There was a definite difference between the playback of the 96/24 and the 44.1/16.

The problem was that there was not a lot I could do with 96/24 wav files from that point on - other than archiving them off onto DVD's as data for playback through the PC.

What I really wanted to do was to be able to produce a DVD that my DVD player could read.

Uptil last week I was stuck at this point. The only piece of software I had found that would do what I wanted cost $5000 and there was no way I was going to come up with that kind of $$$.

Then I came across a little company in holland called Eximus (www.eximus.nl). They have a piece of software called DVD+audio creator that does exactly what I wanted, and for $50 the price was very much right.

If your DVD player supports native 96/24 playback on normal DVD's (some do - some dont - downsampling on the fly to 48/16) this is definitely worth a play.

Anyway I have played a fair bit with the software using both vinyl and CD's upsampled as my source with some fairly reasonable results. There seems to be a little vagueness about the centre of the soundstage that affects voices more than anything but in all other respects this is a leap forwards from normal CD. This vagueness is definitely a product of the transfer to the DVD (it is not apparent when going direct from the hard-disk).

Hoepfully a newer version will be out soon that will address the issue. If not then I will pre-equalize the recorded wav files prior to transfer and see if I can balance the effect out.

Is this the kind of thing you guys discuss round here? I certainly hope so - I cant find anyone else who understands a word I am saying otherwise!!

[dwk123]

Among my many and various projects I'm intending to do more or less exactly what you've done - record my vinyl to 24/96 dvd's. I have played with the eval version of the eximinus product, and it seems to work OK. I'm not going to spring for the full version until I convince myself that I can't do the same thing under linux with 10 lines of perl.....

IMHO it's almost a no-brainer as a way to archive vinyl. I'm not really convinced that vinyl 'needs' the extra resolution/bandwidth, but I think that it gives you such a big margin for error that you should always end up with good/useful recordings. If you record at 16 bit it's tight, as you have to leave a fair bit of headroom to allow for clicks/pops, which reduces the DR available for the signal.

BTW - for anyone considering recording vinyl you should seriously look at the new Emu sound cards - the 1212M is $200 and would be ideal for recording vinyl if you have a high-quality rig. A/D dynamic range performance of ~115dB (although this will drop a bit if you use unbalanced consumer-level signals) which is better than any other affordable card out there.
I picked up the 1820M which actually includes an RIAA stage in it, although I doubt it'll be acceptable for archiving purposes.