Digital recording distortion and clicking at 48.0k - all fine at 44.1k

Audacity 3.3.3
Mac OS 10.14.6
iMac 2017 (2.3Ghz Intel Core i5)
ESI U24XL interface taking coax spdif into USB of Mac

Following the advice on the wiki, I was able to get a clean capture of a DAT tape at 44.1k by setting the buffer to zero.

I have another DAT tape that’s recorded at 48k, but even though it plays/sounds clean through the monitors, when I play the file back from Audacity, I’ve got periodic pretty consistent distorted moments. I’ve tried the following buffer amounts, which seem to change the frequency of the distortion occurrences (and sometimes the way they sound), but none of them have worked to get a clean transfer: 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 100, 500.

Anyone have success with this setup and 48k or have any ideas on what I might want to try? Thanks.

FWIW, I also tried a similar Macbook pro, but with an SSD in case drive speed was the issue, but got the same distortion. Then I installed Audacity 3.3.3 on a similarly powered laptop running Windows 10 and the 48k transfer seems to be coming in fine with no distortion. Would love to have all this working on my iMac, so if anyone has any tips, please let me know. Thanks.

This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.