Glad the Benchmark worked. I suspect you would get pretty much the same result going directly to the PC via USB since the digital signal going to the PC does not depend on highly accurate timing information. But I also like the idea of writing to a disk rather than tying up a PC to do the recording.
You observations support the idea that the Tascam may be OK for moderate level systems, but its shortcomings become apparent on a higher end, more revealing systems.
Thanks for posting your observations.
What are you using for processing the files? Have you tried Vinyl Studio? It has a free trial and is only $29 to buy. I find it easy to use and like that it will look up album information, so I do not have to hand enter it. It also does click removal, hiss, hum, etc. non-destructively, so you always have the original to go back to. As any software, it takes a little to get use to it, but the workflow is pretty straightforward, since it was designed for recording, not general purpose editing.
Have you compared 96/24 and 192/24? I find a large difference between 44 and 96, but only a very slight difference between 96 and 192. I use 192 mostly because disk space is cheap and this is hopefully the only time I will digitize these records. |
Jwm - that should work, although the Benchmark has a word clock output and on the Ayre that is an option you have to add. |
Dhl93449 - Vinyl Studio lets you set the end of a track and the beginning of the next one, cutting out the part in between. You set the end then move the green arrow to the start of the next track. Very easy to do. When you write out the files you can also add silence to the beginning and/or end of a track. It also does album lookup for track names and breaks, which a real time saver. Its main source for that is discogs, which is nice since CDs and records are sometimes different. My guess is dBpoweramp does lookups based on CDs.
VS also does normalization. It am pretty sure it does it in floating point, not sure what precision. But you can ask on their forum and Paul will be able to tell you.
With VS you can do corrections (like click removal and hiss removal) on individual sections of the track, so if you are worried about the process you can do it only on short sections that are particularly bad. You can see what the click removal does to the waveform, and you will see that often it does little except take out the obviously bad part. You can also control the amount of the hiss removed and the sensitivity of the click removal. You really should try them. In most cases I cannot hear any adverse effect on the sound, but the hiss and click removal makes many passages much more listenable. You can listen to the section with and without the correction to see how it sounds. I use headphones for this and although the sound on the PC is not as good as on the stereo, you should be able to tell if you are damaging the underlying music.
I know I sound like a VS salesman, but it really is a good program for a very low cost. Charlie Hansen at Ayre also recommends it, so I am in good company.
As to writing to disk or a PC, I am with you on that. That was one reason I went with the Korg. |
Dhl93449 - You just listen to the track and identify the track time. You can then zoom in on that point. The click will be pretty obvious in the waveform. You can select a small region and have VS do the correction or there is a manual tool which lets you adjust the width of the correction. It shows you the original and the corrected waveform and lets you listen to either one. You do each channel separately. Again, I use headphones for doing this.
For more complicated corrections there are also patch tools (e.g. FFT) that analyze the surrounding waveform and fit a corrected waveform. This is usually a last resort, but can be good. for example, if you have a scratch that runs along the grove rather than perpendicular to it.
You should try doing click repair on a whole track at the lowest sensitivity. You can look at the waveform and you see clearly the little clicks and pops which may be barely audible but have distorted the waveform and the correction smooths them out. People are always concerned about changing the music, but the flaws have already done that. I would say the same thing about hiss. If you can hear hiss on a low volume section, why not try removing the hiss? Again, you can do that on the whole album, a single track, or on an individual section.
The nice thing about VS is that the corrections are non-destructive. That is, they are stored in a separate file and only applied on output. The original file is never changed.
People also use Isotope RX 5 as a correction tool, but that is $349. For me, VS does the job for a lot less money. |
The original files (e.g., wav files from the Tascam) are left unchanged and the output files (usually the individual tracks - I use flac) contain the corrected audio. The changes are maintained in separate files and are only applied to the output files when their are created. The VS website has documentation and screen shots of the process if you want to see the details. |
But here we are talking about using VS to enhance the files created by
the DA-3000, and the VS is not used during the recording process,
correct? Correct. You do not need VS to do the recording. VS will allow you to break the file into tracks and name them and also to eliminate the gaps between tracks. For DSD files you cannot do any correction (click removal, hum or hiss removal) without changing to PCM. I started with DSD but soon found that I wanted to do corrections on most of my albums and went to PCM to do that. At least with my DAC, I do not heard much difference between DSD and PCM. You should try both and see if you can hear the difference. As a playback device I think the DA-3000 is somewhat limited. From the specs I believe it only takes 64 GB cards or flash drives. That can be limiting when each 5.8 MHz DSD album is over 4 GBs. If you can put a large external drive on it, then you might be OK, although the "user interface" is certainly limited. The usb interface is usb 1.1 according to the specs. |
Vinyl Studio will convert DSD to PCM but not PCM to DSD. JRiver can convert PCM to DSD.
I think the DirecStream converts PCM to DSD internally on the fly for playback. I do not own what, but pretty sure that is what I read about its architecture. So I do not think you need to do any conversion yourself.
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I was referring to the Tascam software and thought you could check on the PS Audio forum. I do not participate there.
There is a need for some people to convert, e.g. 2xDSD to 1xDSD and a program that did that without converting to PCM as an intermediate would be nice to have.
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From what I can tell, although I have not used it, the Tascam software is pretty limited.
It allows you to work on one file at a time and does not allow a full album file to be treated as an album. There is no tagging of album, artist, composer, track name, etc. To output tracks from an album, you need to select an area then write it out, typing in the track name if you want to use that as the file name. You repeat that for each track. That is a pretty laborious task compared to something like Vinyl Studio which looks up albums on the Internet and provides track timing and track names. The software does not appear to have a facility to find track breaks.
The software does not have any correction capability nor any normalization function.
It does not have support for file formats other than wav, dsf and dsdiff so, for example, flac is not available.
It does seem to convert PCM to DSD and vice versa. And, it appears to convert between different DSD sample rates. I cannot figure out from the documentation if it does so by converting to PCM or not. Perhaps someone of the PS Audio forum knows if DSD to DSD conversion goes through PCM. If not, that would be a nice addition to know about.
If it converts between dsd formats without using pcm as an intermediate, that would be very useful. Other than that, VS is much more versatile.
Can you check on whether dsd conversions go through pcm?
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Thanks. We will see if he knows. Otherwise I might call Tascam and ask them.
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Question sent to Tascam. There wording in their description is a little vague. Hopefully, they will be able to answer. A free utility that converted between different dsd sample rates without going through PCM would be a welcome addition.
I did download the software to an Windows 8.1 i3 system and it took a several minutes to display the waveform on a 6 minute track.
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There was a thread a while back where a guy used a Tascam DR-5 to record his vinyl. He was happy with the results, although I do not remember the setup. Don't know what the input state looks like. As I remember he might even be trying to sell the unit.
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