[Ardour-Users] Experience? Rework an external 44.1 KHz 16 bit recording

[Arnold Krille]

On Thursday 19 August 2010 13:13:37 Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> Hi :)
> 
> last Saturday I made a home recording of a C. Bechstein grand piano
> using a pair of AKG C 1000 S microphones and a Mackie console. As
> expected the sound quality has some annoying limits.
> Furthermore the recording was done with a studio DAT recorder, but I was
> ordered to record at 44.1 KHz and to adjust the level until it reached 0
> dBfs or more ;). The reason for this was the need directly after doing
> the recordings, to burn a CD with a stand alone drive, because someone
> else immediately needed a loud CD. Fortunately I could do it as a 2
> channel recording, but a stereo mix, so each microphone has it's own
> channel. The recording was done without using EQs, compressor, limiter
> etc., hence I guess it should be possible to increase the quality a
> little bit.
> I've got an audio CD of the recordings too. Regarding to the less good
> analog IOs of my Terratec EWX 24/96 cards I've got 3 options to export
> the music to Ardour, instead of using the analog IOs of the cards.
> 
> 1. Using a CD ripper
> 2. Using S/PDIF of a CD player
> 3. Using a DAT recorder to convert anlog audio from a CD player to 48
> KHz S/PDIF
> 
> I would prefer to record by S/PDIF, because I like to record the needed
> parts, instead of using the virtual scissors.

Not so good idea: Directly ripping the CD and then converting the samplingrate 
with libsamplerate gives you a higher quality then doing the resampling online 
by some strange recording chip you can't control.
And what is wrong with virtual scissors? They work both destructive or non-
destructive (depending on the app and workflow you use) and they allow far more 
precise cuts then manual recording or automated recording synced to for 
example smpte.

And I don't really see why a recording with C1000 should be low quality per 
se. The Mackie reduces the quality a little bit, would have been better to 
have dedicated pre-amps preferably with ad-converters built in. But all in all 
if the recording sounds bad, its not the fault of the tools used, but the 
fault of the technician;-) Only the poor craftsmen blames his tools.

Arnold
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