Topic: Recommend me a good external soundcard

[todayforever]

Hi All, first post...

I have about 100 DATs, at various sample rates, that I would like to archive to flac, wav, aiff or whatever, pure digital transfers, no resampling. A lot of the tapes are master recordings, and a few are over a decade old now, so I want to back them up before anything happens to them.

So, I need a good firewire external soundcard which will take a SPDIF signal from my Tascam DAT deck and make a bit-perfect 32/44.1/48 wav/lossless copy that I can dump straight to my mac powerbook and archive to external hd or dvd-r. I have a M-Audio Firewire pro card currently but it doesn't support 32khz so is useless for this task.

Budget - wouldn't like to pay more than $200 if I can avoid it. I really only need this for digi-transfers, so A>D conversion is not an issue.

Any help would be very gratefully received. Thanks!

[jerazis]

  Not 100% positive but unless you come out of the DAT Deck with analog you are stuck with the bit rate the DAT recorded at. Your audio software may say its 32 bit but that is a poor ASIO issue. DAT is 16 bit unless played back analog and re sampled  to DSD, 24bit, 32bit or what not via your sound card. But if You are lookin for a good external box go with Presonus or M-audio stuff.  Presonus tends to have low THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) down around .0001 , and 20-20 frequency response. Oh ya and look through site I'm sure there are dozens of post that will help you along.   

[Brian Skalinder]

Not sure if it would work, but you might be able to transfer the 32 kHz recordings with your current card.

My internal M-Audio Audiophile 2496 allows me to set the Master Clock to Internal or S/PDIF Input.  Setting the Master Clock to Internal resamples the incoming signal;  setting it to S/PDIF Input does not resample the signal.  After selecting S/PDIF Input for the Master Clock, the control panel provides multiple sample rate options:  32, 44.1, 48, 88.1, 96 kHz.  Even though your soundcard doesn't support 32 kHz, I'm wondering if your current soundcard would satisfy your requirements with a small workaround.  Here's how it might work, if you're willing to do a quick test:

• Set your soundcard's Master Clock to the S/PDIF Input.  If the soundcard control panel provides a selection of sample rates, pick one; shouldn't matter which, let's assume 48 kHz for the sake of discussion.
• Perform the transfer.
• Save the WAV file.  I'm guessing the file will have correct 32 kHz data, but a WAV header of 48 kHz (from the first bullet).*  This mismatched data and header will cause the file to sound as though it's playing back much too fast.  Don't worry, it's easily fixed in the next step.
• Re-write the WAV Header to 32 kHz (http://taperssection.com/index.php/topic,80888.0.html).  Note:  this does not resample, i.e. it does not change the data, it merely re-writes the WAV Header.
  
  

Obviously, I'm making two big assumptions here:  <1> your soundcard allows you to set the clock to the S/PDIF input, and <2> even though the soundcard doesn't officially support 32 kHz, it will preserve the 32 kHz data while writing the WAV header's sample rate incorrectly...thereby enabling you to fix the WAV header and be on your way.

[todayforever]

Thanks for this Brian - extremely useful. Having made my original post, I actually came across your WAV header fix solution: I've not tried it yet, but that sounds like it could be the way to go, providing the sound card will play ball. I've found this in the manual:

Sync Source – This field allows you to choose between the FireWire Audiophile’s
internal clock and an external clock source. Internal selects the incoming clock from
the FireWire bus as set by your audio software. Use external when you wish to record
from the S/PDIF inputs, or otherwise lock to the sample rate from an external S/PDIF
source.

So I'm guessing I'm good to go.

Now to dig my crate of DATs out of storage!

Many thanks again for your help.

[H₂O]

Not sure if you are interested in the DDS drive route.

I have had alot of success with this route - and I know you can get a Firewire SCSI adapter (Belkin works) to work with Free MAC Software.  Will probably work with 32Khz but this depends on the software.

If you get a Sony drive (SDT-9000 - costs about $100 new) and flash to 12.2 Firmware you should be set and the Sony drives are very good about reading older dats.  Also these drives are designed to last longer than most DAT players (in a streaming setting) and you can extract the audio in about 1/2 the time it takes to do it with a DAT player and digital sound card.

Another nice feature is most software will give you an error log after the audio is extracted so you can see where potential dropouts, diginoise, etc are.