Bad audio quality.

[Frisbee]

Hi;

I just bought a tv tuner card from Hercules: Smart tv stereo.
While watching tv, audio is good.
While recording tv, audio is good.
But while playing back a recorded prgramme, audio quality is BAD: it sounds like bad radio reception.

I have this problem in all quality modes, but remember that only the audio quality of recorded files is bad, in VCD, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 modes.

My audio card is a Turtle Beach Montego (PCI).
Windows shows no irq-conflicts or so.

Secondly, one more question: which is best: VCD or MPEG-1?
I don't really see a difference.

Thanks for your help!
Carl
Belgium

 

[Frisbee]

Come on guys!
I need advice here, because I can't find the problem.

Is the soundcard used during recording to encode the sound?
Could it be that my old Turtle Beach Montego PCI soundcard can't ecode MPEG1 or -2 sound?

Pleasy help.
Carl

 

[jdn999]

I have an ATI Radeon 8500 and on it the sound is recorded throgh the sound card through the "mic in".

I started using it to record some video and got static - bad static with the soundtrack. Bad enough to destroy the value. After beating myself to death over it, I worked down to finding out that sound is recorded through standard Windows recording systems - I tested recording sound in Windows alone through the Windows sound recorder, and found static was just as bad.

This on two machines running AC'97 integrated sound systems - one without the video capture card. Which played sound wonderfully - just recorded like crap.

So I installed my Creative Labs PCI 128 sound card; first it wouldn't install then, I moved it to a different PCI port and it installed. (A day down the train fighting that...)

Sound in video is much better with the Creative labs card. But I've spent so much time fighting with the issue I haven't had much time to use it.

Your card may differ: but mine records through the sound card, and it seems some sound cards give bad recordings.

I hunted my heart out for "static" and "sound" on the net, and found no references; but thinking about it and reading other vaguely similar posts, there can be other problems. I tried all sorts of settings, driver updates and the AC'97 integrated sound never recorded right; I never had the time to try the possibility of it being a problem with the cables I used or such.

From my experience, Creative Soundblaster cards should record okay and you don't have to get a real expensive one - I used to have a Soundblaster 16 that worked just fine years ago when I let my neices record their voice through a microphone; bought the more expensive 128 and wasted money for a few frills (3d sound and such). Hadn't been using it lately because my new motherboard came wih integrated sound - which was fine until I started trying to record video!

I can only hope some guru could post one little message "fixing" it all and explaining how to get any sound card to record good soundtracks, but doubt it...

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by jdn999 on 12/12/02 01:30 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Frisbee]

Many thanks for the info.

I seem to have found a solution myself in the meantime.
Yes, my tv tuner card also record audio through the line in of my soundcard.
At first I thought that it sounded like a bad radio reception, but after A WEEK I realised that it acually sounded like something very different:
a too high recording volume!
Like when you record on tape and let the recording volume go above 0DB all of the time.
You can also easily reproduce this bad quality by shouting into your pc's microphone: the sound will be very bad.

So what did I do?
I went to the Audio Properties in Windows,
selected the recording source and pushed the "Volume" button.
Then I lowered the line-in volume downto roughly a third of its maximum settings,
and voilà! Now the sound is fine.

Maybe the line-in sensitivity of all soundcards differs, and maybe the level signal sent by some tuner cards to line in is too high for some soundcards.
So lowering the line in volume in Windows seemed to have solved my problem!
The only thing I worry about is that I've had to put it very low, maybe I'll have more background noise now.

Maybe you could try that too with the AC'97 codec of your mobo: Lower its line in volume.

That doesn't take away my other problem: I can't encode MP3s without hearing static in the result. Probably my Turtle Beach Montego IS outdated. But that's for another forum message...

Thanks again;
Carl

 

[macoulombe]

I was hoping to find my fix when someone responded to your post be that I am having the same bad audio quality to my captured output file (WMF). I tried adjusting my audio settings but it didn't help. I've tried this in WinXP & 98 OS's. I would think that my problem is software be that I can watch the captured video with excellent sound...it's the playback that sucks. Thanx for any help.

I did find a site that likely addresses my problem. Damn Via chipsets. http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_capture
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by macoulombe on 12/17/02 00:47 AM.</EM></FONT></P>