There are several options, the best being, buying a BIT-PERFECT digital soundcard. DO NOT EVER EVER EVER BUY A CREATIVE SOUNDBLASTER NO MATTER WHAT THE SALESPERSON TELLS YOU. You might as well just throw your money in the garbage, 'cause that's about how much the SoundCrapsters are worth.
Again, I'm going to disagree with you, Terry. I know that this is not a popular notion among tapers, but not all Soundblasters resample on capture from a S/PDIF source. I agree that the Soundblaster Live! series of soundcards resampled EVERYTHING, whether it needed it or not. I mean you could apply a 48 kHz S/PDIF source to the S/PDIF input to the Soundblaster Live! card and it would still resample it... with samples aligned to its own 48 kHz clock which usually runs a little bit fast.
However, the Soundblaster Audigy 2 series of cards does not resample digital inputs and such inputs will not be resampled unless your recording software is configured to record at a different rate than it's receiving. With most recording software, you'll get a bit literal copy of what you put in.
On the other hand, Soundblaster Audigy 2 cards
do resample 44.1 kHz sources to 48 kHz on playback, but that's only used to drive the soundcard's D/A converters. It doesn't do anything to the 44.1 kHz source itself.
So, if your main concern is to transfer a bit literal copy of the PCM data on your DAT tape to a hard drive on your computer, a Soundblaster Audigy 2 series soundboard will work just fine. However, you can do the same thing for less money with an Audiophile 2496 or a Zoltrix Nightengale (so I'm told). I've personally used both the Audiophile 2496 and the Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum. They both produce bit literal copies every time, verified by making 2 copies, inverting one, lining them up in a multitrack editor and mixing them down, yielding absolute silence, with the exception of the short period of time at the beginning of a transfer where the soundcard is trying to synch up to the source. It's common to get some bit errors in the first few hundred samples. Actually, the Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum card that I use synchs up faster than the Audiophile 2496, so I actually get slightly better results with the Soundblaster. But, once the cards are synched to the source, they produce absolutely identical results.
There's more on this topic in another recent thread that went on for about 4 pages so far:
http://www.taperssection.com/yabbse/index.php?topic=23651.0
Topic: DAT > CD help.... (Read 1635 times)