Audacity Forum

The vocals that are recorded are almost lost in the music. The voice part of the music is very muffled and much fainter than in the original LP playback. The music seems to record at the right level but the voices simply faid back into the background.

I cannot find anything helpful under as search using words like muffled, though it sounds like other people have similar problems, but I cannot find a solution.

david.francis.nz wrote:The vocals that are recorded are almost lost in the music. The voice part of the music is very muffled and much fainter than in the original LP playback. The music seems to record at the right level but the voices simply faid back into the background.

This may perhaps be a fault in your set-up. If you have a wire connected the wrong way round then you may be getting phase reversal on one channel and creating a kind of "vocal removal" effect.

Please describe (in detail) how your system is set up, for recording, for playback, and for playing "the original LP playback".

Thanks - Am using a Digitech Audio Turntable Player GE-4059, which came with a mini CD with Audacity on it V1.2.6.

In Audacity Preferences the recording device is set to - USB PnP Audio Device and Channels 2 - Stereo

The Playback Device is Realtek AC97 Audio.

On the Quality Panel Default Sample Rate is 44100HZ

Default Sample Format is 32 bit float

Real Time Sample Rate Converter is Fast Sinc Interpolation

High Quality Sample Rate Converter is High Quality Sinc Interpolation

Real time Dither is none

High Quality Dither is Triangle.

Uncompressed Export Format is WAV Microsoft 16bit PCM

OGG Quality is 5

FFT Size is 256 Default

Maximum Frequency is 8000

Under the Control Panel - Advanced Audio Properties Peformance

Hardware Acceleration is Full

Sample Rate Conversion Quality is Best.

The turntable is connected to a USB Port using the supplied USB Cable.

This is the setup on my PC running XP Professional.

We have also had this connected to another PC running Vista with equally unusable results.

All we want to do is to take an old Vynall Library and transfer it to digital format - nothing fancy or time consuming.

Maybe it's not Audacity or the turntable. Maybe your speakers are connected wrong.

Download and play the Left-Right-Mono sound clip and play it.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

The last segment is intentionally damaged and should sound weird, hollow, or low. If segment three does that instead, you have a speaker or wiring problem.

Koz

Everything is fine with your test track thanks for the assistance.

I have a 3 speaker system, Left, Right and a central "base" one.

The other computer we are using simply has 2 speakers built into the Compaq monitor.

I have rar'd up a clip of the tinny music which leads into the singing after about 60 seconds and downloaded it with my previous email as an example of what we are getting.

I have tried playing with it with things like Equaliser having found a thread on - How do I make Vocals crisper - but all I seem to achieve is making things worse not better?

You can get vocal cancellation like that if one or more of the pins inside the phono cartridge are broken. Did the cartridge come separate from the arm and you put it on yourself? Can you take it off and put it back a couple of times? Inspect the pins under the cartridge with a mirror.

There's nothing in the digital pathway that can cause this.

Koz

Thanks - no it was an assembled unit. I'll have a look at it thanks for the suggestion.

Maybe is this pointing to a "Cheap - Nasty" USB Turntable device??

Everything looks OK under the cartridge - 4 wires all in place, have slid the needle unit off and on.

Here's a little test to see if we are actually looking in the right area - it may also provide a usable workaround to the problem.

1) Record a track that exhibits this issue (muffled voice but instruments OK) - alternatively open a previously recorded WAV file (not an MP3) that has this issue.
2) Click on the name of the track and select "split stereo track"
3) Select ONE of the tracks (there will now be 2 single channel tracks)
4) From the Effects menu select "Invert"
5) Press play - does it now sound normal?

That is some progress thanks, the voices/singing can now be heard from the RH track, but there is now a lot of "noise" on the track as well.

However the voices/singing is little improved by doing the same thing to the LH Track, but the noise level has increased also.

Recombining them back to a stereo track returns the voices/singing to muted - actually more muted, and the noise level is greatly increased from the original track.