I recently purchased a Phono Preamp (ART DJPRE II) and connected it between my Philips AF 592 record player and my computer’s line-in. That is, connected my record player to the phono preamp using a 5 pin din to RCA cable into the Preamp Line In. And from the Line out of the Preamp to the computer’s line-in using a RCA to 3.5 mm stereo jack.
I am using the latest version of Audacity 2.0.3 and my PC is a Dell Inspiron 530 with Realtek High Definition Audio sound card (latest device drivers-March 2013). When I play the vinyl and try to record the audio using Audacity, I only get a loud buzz sound. I have grounded the Preamp with the record player and also kept the power and the RCA cables wide apart to reduce the buzz sound. To a fair extent the buzz has reduced. But, still there is a buzz when I record using Audacity. Trying to increase the gain on the preamp is increasing the buzz and not the audio output. When I stop recording and play from Audacity, I only get a buzz sound and a very faint audio. I have checked the device toolbar of Audacity and selected the correct Audio output, Line in device and 2 channels.
What could be the problem for the continuous buzz? Can someone please help?
That effectively combines the ART preamp you bought with a good DAC (soundcard) and outputs via USB direct to your computer. The ART’s soundcard will almost certainly be better that the on-board soundcard in your computer.
I actually run a DJ-Pre11 and it is excellent - but I feed it’s output to an external USB soundcard (an Edirol UA-1EX). If the ART USB integrated unit had been available when I was purchasing I certainly would have bought that.
My recommendation would be to see if you can return the DJ-Pre11 and upgrade to the USB Phono Plus.
And as Steve hints here those old 5-pin DIN plugs are notoriously hard to solder up and make noise free (even the ones they used to sell ready made up).
My old QUAD 33 has 5-pin DIN inputs and those do work fine (he says touching wood frantically), but I bought pro-quality leads at the time of purchase rather the bog-standard off-the-shelf cheapies.
Thanks Steve and Waxcylinder. I will check the 5 pin din socket to see if the soldered wires are in order or not and also change the 5 pin din cable and try connecting to the pre amp to check if the audio signals comes through or not. Will keep you posted.
The 5 pin din to RCA cable, though a new one, was the problem for the loud buzz. Thanks for the pointer. Now, here is what was tested in the 5 pin din cable. The two RCA cables were not matching with the audio output pins on the 5 pin din. The pin number 1 & 4 in the 5 pin din give out the audio, but this was not connected correctly to the RCA cables. So, took a new cabke (5pin din to 4 pin EP cable), tested which two wires of the EP pins were pointing to the 1 & 4 pins on the 5 pin din and then connected them with RCA pins. Voila! the audio singals were coming and could record through Audacity.
While recording, the gain/clip light gives out a red light. I reduced the gain to minimum and still I see streaks of red light in between. This causes a noticeable ‘tick’ sound in between. I zoomed in on the waveform and noticed that the wave is not uniform and the edges are malformed into multiple squares. I have attached a screenshot. I read in the audacity tutorial that these waveforms can be corrected manually using the draw tool to bring it to the normal shape, which I did and it works fine. The problem is that the entire song has many such places where the ‘tick’ sound has to be removed. Is there any other way of correcting the waveforms in one go?
You have a huge mismatch between one of the output levels and one of the input levels.
Are you sure that the computer input is a “line” input and not a “Mic” input?
Are you talking here about the overload/clipping light on the DJ-Pre11 device??
If so than you shouldn’t be getting red streaks flickers there at low gain settings - unless, that is, you have a massively overloaded input signal.
The gain control on mine is the primary signal level that I use to control the levels from my TT recordings (I leave the Edirol UA-1EX set for an optimal signal level for FM radio recording).
I noticed that I am getting these ‘tick’ sounds, which lasts less than a second, on some of my old records and not on my ‘not so old’ records . Also, the number of ocurrences are about 15 times in a 5 minute song. Could it be because of the scratches on the record? Anyways, coming back to my original question, is there a way these waveforms can be corrected by a couple of commands rather than manually correcting using the ‘draw’ tool?
