Alright well first if theres some sticky on the basics then forgive me I did not see any.
Im trying to get a handle on this audio business. Perhaps Ill start by sharing what has gotten me into it, seeing thats where most of my question are derived.
First started when I was looking at the back of my video game reading how it supports some form of Dolby (I think Dolby Live) I wanted to know what exactly that meant, so I started reading about all the different Dolby forms and what they do, and got confused.
Started looking at sound cards and what they support and got confused. Started looking at PC speaker systems to support 5 channel audio for my game which seems to be designed to be used with a 5 channel setup. Learned a bit along the way, what I seemed to focus on was making sure that I didnt have a weak link in the chain.
I wanted my computer hardware to be able to support the Dolby formats my games are coded to use, I want a sound system that can process whats being handed to it as well, now I want to know the best (quality) way to do it. Started looking into audio systems that connected by USB. Knowing that USB is a very fast way to transfer data I figure that this must be a high quality connection.
Using logic I know from graphics cards... A VGA cable signal (analog) is not very good quality. A DVI cable (digital) is great quality and can transfer higher amounts of data, which is needed for a higher resolution picture. Now to step it up even further, you can now get LCD's that go 2560x1600 resolution, a DVI cable cannot send that much data, thus you need a Dual-link DVI cable, it has x amount more wires in it.
So I find myself trying to figure out whats the highest quality ways to do audio.... The more I learn about digital audio the more confused I get. My focus is understand signals from start to end, how they are sent, processed, ect.
Recording questions
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Im ripping vinyl records to my computer using a AT-LP2D via USB. I do have an older technica player that im having troubles connecting to my pc, it doesnt have a USB out on it. The audio has tons of noise all over the spectrum, and for some reason now, the rips are not recording any audio over 4khz, although in the spectrum you can see pops here and there which spike all the way to 20khz, what would cause this? Computer hardware issues or the record player?
- Can I just connect it through the Left and Right RCA's to the computer or would it need some sort of amp?
- Is the computers sound card working as an amp to boost the signal Or does it not need boosted?
- It just converts an analog signal to 1's and 0's Amplification is only needed for outputting? which im not doing yet.
Playback questions
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Alright I got piece of digital audio on my computer lets just say for now its an uncompressed WAV file, im going to send it to my AMP, which will process the file and what determines how its played?
- This is where Dolby and DTS come into play, is it not? They determine how the audio is split amongst the speakers?
- Whats going to be the best way (quality) to transfer data from PC to an amp?
- If my computer is processing the sound to output it to the amp, isnt the amp (depending on amp options) going to be doing the same?
- Whats going to process the sound better a computer or an amp? (does that even make sense?)
I read some bits here and there that windows sound control is not good at processing audio. In theory, how would it differ from burning this WAV audio file on cd and playing it on a DVD player vs. outputting to an amp from the computer. I guess, whats going to do a better job at processing sound, a computer or a DVD player. Now im sure that would depend on the DVD player and the soundcard, in essence a computer and a DVD are both computers..
