M-Audio Firewire Audiophile for recording

[Noman]

I know some of you has got this soundcard. Any opinions on how good it is for recording an analog signal (From vinyl recordings of course)?

I prefere to record at 96khz 32bit (float) because the large headroom you get for "restoring".

I've ordered one (they've dropped heavily in price) for playback purposes, but if the recording quality is good enough I will rip out my internal souncard and use only the M-audio

[Bernie]

Unlike my old Lexicon card, which usually had conflicts with something at the most inopportune time the M-Audio Firewire Audiophile has served me well. It was a breeze to set up. Since it is not a PCI card it seems not to pick up any computer related noise/interference, which means very little background noise.

I run it under Mac OS-X (Tiger) with Bias Peak and have used high sample/bit rates with great results. Couldn't ask for anything more and since it is Firewire it plugs right in to the Mac with no hassles.

When you get it make sure to go to M-Audio's web site and download the most up-to-date driver for it as the CD-ROM in the box may have an older one. Good luck!

[QUINNY]

I know some of you has got this soundcard. Any opinions on how good it is for recording an analog signal (From vinyl recordings of course)?

I prefere to record at 96khz 32bit (float) because the large headroom you get for "restoring".

I've ordered one (they've dropped heavily in price) for playback purposes, but if the recording quality is good enough I will rip out my internal souncard and use only the M-audio

I'm puzzled. Why would you need to record @ 96Khz, 32 bit when you'll probably be knocking it back to good old 44.1Khz, 16 bit at some point? Surely all the extra headroom in the world isn't going to get over the basic problem that vinyl only has a 25-40 dB dynamic range in the first place? Even with the amazing clean up tools available, you're never going to acheive the 100+ dB dynamic range that 32 bit offers without it sounding 'processed'.
Surely, you're only creating unecessarily large files?

[Bernie]

Quinny: http://www.transom.org/tools/basics/...talbasics.html

[Noman]

Thanks for the link Bernie

It's not to achieve 100dB+ dynamics (cause it isn't there from the beginning)

It's to eliminate loss in Soundquality after those multiple tiny ,winy steps I go through in restoring "not 100% perfect" originals. Notch filters, noice reduction in very narrow freq ranges etc.

I normally don't alter EQ and I never boost the amplitude with limiters (which they very sadly does on most CD reissues of old material.)

Might be overkill sometimes, but my own rips sounds better than most commercial releases based on vinyl and that makes ME happy.

And also for mixing 32bit is crucial.

The advantage is that you can pile on the tracks and if the final output clips you can just turn down the master fader, You don't have to reduce each fader until the clipping at the output disappears.

A 32 bit floating point can define very small signals, and is practically overload proof.

And yes, I'm "knocking it back to good old 44.1Khz, 16 bit" when I'm ready.

[BrunoRepublic]

I'm puzzled. Why would you need to record @ 96Khz, 32 bit when you'll probably be knocking it back to good old 44.1Khz, 16 bit at some point?

For above 44.1KHz, this is only relevant if you're planning for DVD-audio or some future format. But if you view it as an archival work, it never hurts to use more headroom and frequency range, whereas what sometimes seems "good enough" at the time isn't under closer scrutiny. Others maintain that digital EQ is inherently harsh at the top end, so processing at 96KHz puts the nastiness in a range which will be filtered out when downsampling to 44.1. I'm not sure that I buy that argument, but there you have it.

However, even if your final output is CD audio, bit depth really does matter if you are doing any processing to the file after recording. Each transformation at 16-bit adds quantization noise, so if you're doing multiple changes after recording, it's very important to use 24-bit. In a typical restoration project, I will use a 20Hz lowpass filter, an overall volume adjustment, thousands of click-repairs, EQ (both parametric and often a gradual increase to compensate end-of-side treble rolloff), a slight amount of noise reduction, and a touch of hard-limiting. If I do all this in 16-bit, the results are *nasty*. Doing it in 32-bit keeps everything smooth until the final stage, at which point a bit of dither is added when converting to 16-bit. BTW, these apps don't use true 32-bit, but 32-bit float, which is really 24-bit with absurd amounts of headroom. This is invaluable for when processing puts the signal over 0db, as you can normalize back down and suffer no clipping. In 16 or 24-bit, if you boost something past 0, you've got ugly ugly digital clipping, and your file is ruined.

So -- if I'm just doing a straight transfer to CD, with only some volume adjustment for processing, I'll record 16/44.1. For anything else, I use 32-bit.