Ripping vinyl, missing some instruments

Hey all, new to the forum. I know most rules of forums as I’m a longtime member at various other sites. I have a USB enabled Pro-Ject turntable and have run into an odd problem while ripping my vinyl. As a specific example, I have an old vinyl that I know very well. First song has a striking horn that is in the right channel (speaker) and loud clear cut cowbell in left channel. Yet, when I load up Audacity, click pause, click record, lower the needle and then record, (I have it set so that I can hear what I’m recording) horns are simply gone and the cowbells that are normally loud are so far back I can barely hear them. But, the volume and overall volume of all other sounds (vocals, guitars) are intact and coming from both speakers.

I’ve tried changing many settings, including the sample rate, sample format, etc. Rebooted laptop, reinstalled Audacity to current version, unplugged AVR, plugged back in. Go through same album, same problem. Other albums that I know have particular passages have the same issue.

I am at a loss. I’ve been troubleshooting for days now with no luck. Oh, and I also tried all of my USB ports on my laptop just to make sure that one didn’t work better than the other. With each, I get the exact same problem.

What a great product, though. I’ve had it for a couple years and have had success over a year ago, so I don’t know what has happened. I’m sure it’s something I’m doing wrong, but don’t know what. Thanks for taking the time to help. :slight_smile:

Gene

If your setup is somehow recording your stereo-input as dual-mono*, that can cause some instruments to disappear, via destructive-interference.

[ *dual-mono looks like a stereo-pair, but the two tracks are perfectly identical ]

That’s unusual, but I’ve seen it once before and it was caused by the left & right channels of an amplifier/preamp being shorted together… It won’t happen with every circuit design, but basically each of the channels is “shorting out” the signal from the other side, but the “center” (common left & right signals) are “working together”, leaving the stereo signal. (You’re never supposed to connect/short two outputs together for that very reason, the low impedance from one output shorts-out the other output… Solid state equipment is not “impedance matched”… A low-impedance output drives a higher impedance input…)

It’s not an easy thing to do in software, and I don’t believe it can happen accidently in software… In software it’s easy to do the opposite… to make a “vocal remover” by subtracting the left & right to remove the center. And there are ways to mis-wire the connections to get a vocal removal effect electrically (without software). So center-channel removal (accidentally or intentionally) is common, but left & right removal is unusual.

The bottom line is that it’s probably a hardware problem inside the turntable. Some strange things can also happen mechanically with the phono cartridge, but I’m not sure how that would happen.

unplugged AVR

Is the sound OK from your stereo system, or does it have the same problem? If the turntable’s analog outputs are OK, you can use the line-input on a desktop/tower computer, or if you have a laptop you can get a USB interface with line inputs.

If your setup is somehow recording your stereo-input as dual-mono*, that can cause some instruments to disappear, via destructive-interference.

I don’t think that’s it… You’d need an out-of-phase cowbell in the opposite channel combined so they cancel each other, but there’s no cowbell in the other channel.