Sampling rate with Conexant soundcard

Special Interest Groups Recording Equipment
1

Hi

I just made a major improvement to my PC’s recording performance, and it may be of interest generally, since it applies to a very common sound chip, a conexant AC’97. I was measuring the frequency response using a direct wire connection, and noticed that it effectively rolled off abruptly at 8KHz, and had some odd behaviours that looked like AGC gain switching. I tried many things but couldn’t improve the behaviour.

Anyway, I was just browsing round the PC’s Start menu and found a never-before-used app called ‘smartaudio’. On opening, it showed a custom skin titled ‘Mic Enhancement’ and 3 options. The option selected was ‘Voice Recognition/Recording’. I selected ‘No Enhancement’ and immediately the recorded frequency response became smooth up to 20KHz.

So if you’ve got the same app on your machine (it doesn’t show up on the ‘add or remove programs’ list of installed progs by the way) you may well find it is screwing with your recordings.

Lewton

2

Thank you soooo much for your posting this.

I have been fighting my compac presario cq60 laptop with vista and conexant audio every since I got it.

Every time I would try to record from a mic it would record good for about 1 second the the level would drop and the recording would become distored and choppy.

I was able to find the smartaudio program from the search on the start menu and change the setting to no enhancements. My preliminary testing seem to show that I can now record properly. I will have to test it later this week with the ext. mic that I normally use to be certain.

Thanks agian for posting this. I thought I was going to have to go out and buy a usb sound card and now I may not have too.

How did you find that program. If you dont mind me asking

Thanks Mark Shippy