Hi - I'm a newbie so I hope this is in the right place.

I have been planning for years now to digitise my vinyl and cassette collection of classical music and so a while ago I bought an M-Audio AP192 sound card to use with Goldwave or Audacity recording and editing software. I finally started the project recently and have found 2 problems with using the sound card:

- when I play tapes or CDs from my hifi (Rotel amplifier) through the AP192, the maximum signal level I get is in the range -7 to -10dB. On a second system with a USB Soundblaster card to my laptop, there is no problem in getting 0dB and more. M-Audio Tech Support tell me that I need to balance the line input levels between the amp and the sound card (it means nothing to me!) and that the AP192 does not provide for this. So, according to M-Audio I am stuck with unacceptably low input levels

- with the AP192, it is impossible to manage the recording volume levels in Goldwave - the GW Volume Control is greyed out (again, perfectly usable with the Sound Blaster) and there is no control in the Ap192 Control Panel

So - given that the AP192 cost £100 ($200), has anyone any suggestions to make it usable? Or do I put it down to experience, in which case can anyone recommend a quality card that will not give me these problems?? It has to be easy to use and jargon free (see above for my level of ignorance); no real preference PCI or USB.

Feel free to tell me I have missed something very simple with the AP192 - most of the cards and their websites are aimed at music creators, which is an alien world to me.

Many thanks in advance - Roy Simpson

I had the same issue with the M-Audio FireWire Audiophile 2496. It has no adjustable pre-amp bulit in, so the levels are "as-is". And sometimes they can even be too high — if you're recording from a really hot cassette tape, for example.

Tech support told me I need to put a pre-amp or mixer between the source and my sound card to control the level. Well, I decided against that and sold my unit.

Instead, I got an EgoSys Waveterminal 2496 and I love it. It has excellent sound quality, an awesome interface, and completely adjustable input levels. You don't hear about this card much anymore, but I think that's just simply because it's several years out of production.

The closest thing that EgoSys makes now is the Juli@ (no adjustable input levels!) or the MAYA44 (which requires a second interface to have a digital input). I decided against the MAYA because of this extra hassle, although it DOES have adjustable analog input levels.

If you keep an eye out, you can find Waveterminals on eBay for really cheap, almost too cheap sometimes.

Getting -10 dB when recording from a cassette is no problem, since your sound card has a dynamic range of around 100 dB and the cassette will have a dynamic range of as much as 70 dB. 70 dB + 10 dB lost = 80 dB, 100 dB is still way over, you still have 20 dB of headroom, this means the lower 20 dB of you recording will be just noise.

In other words, you card has 100 dB dynamic range or SNR, 10 dB are lost, you still have 90 dB of dynamic range available, which is more than enough for cassette.

Just record to 24 or 32 bits, normalize the recording when finished, and then convert to 16 bit.

I recorded more than 600 LPs into an Audiophile 2496; there have been two that had a few peaks within a few tenths of a dB of 0dB. There have been quite a few with maximum peaks in the -18dB to -24dB range. Since the card's noise floor is a bit below -101dB, all of these recordings came out quite good, with nothing lost to the lower input level; the LP surface noise is always far above the soundcard noise and the lower input level does not change that signal to noise ratio in any measurable way. The only thing that could reduce quality is having the input signal too high and clipping.

You might measure your soundcard's noise with
http://audio.rightmark.org/index_new.shtml
A comparison of those figures with measurements on the unmodulated, between track grooves of a few LPs should show you there is nothing to be concerned about.

A small mixer or line level preamp is the normal way of adjusting input levels when they need adjustments. I use a home made preamp when recording cassettes as they are always significantly lower level than LP from any of the four cassette decks I've been able to use. I suspect I would really not be able to tell the difference between preamp/no preamp recordings, once normalized to the same level, but it is a habit I stuck with when I was doing cassettes.

Professional audio equipment expects a higher signal level than home audio equipment and it normally uses a 3 pin balanced connection rather than a 2 pin unbalanced connection. You can buy little boxes to sort out this common problem:

http://www.mcmelectronics.com/product/555-8485

but as others have said, the dynamic range on a CD is much larger than on a record or cassette and so you will lose nothing by simply recording it as is and then amplifying/normalising the signal digitally with software.

Thanks for the replies on this, especially the explanations of the problem.

Honestguv - I am interested in the type of device you recommend. Unfortunately I can find only one company in the UK that sells the MCM device and, with delivery, it is $100! I reckon it would be cheaper to buy a new soundcard that doesn't have the original problem. So, I'm still searching.

best wishes - Roy

If you read KikeG's post again, you'll see that there is no problem and therefore no need to buy anything.

Cheers, Slipstreem.