tinny odd sound from recordings

[benjisewell]

I have windows 10 on an HP Pavillion Laptop. Recordings on this lapop sound tinny
and have a poor quality. I tried my Asus laptop with windows 8, same thing.
I then went back to my older hp desktop with windows 7 and Audacity works perfect.
Is there something about windows 8, 10 that causes this.
How can I fix it?z
Did others find the same problem?

[kozikowski]

What are you recording? Much past Win7, Windows machines only work well with spoken word like Skype, iChat, or conferencing. They hate music.

Koz

[Robert2]

Sorry, Koz, but Windows 10 works beautifully here with music. And so did Windows 8 and 8.1. It all depends on the hardware, not on the Windows system.
Robert

[kozikowski]

Windows 10 works beautifully here with music.

Maybe playback, but recording is different.

Since Vista, Windows recording defaults to voice processing, echo cancellation and noise suppression. They're famous for it and it affects both Mic-In and built-in microphones if you have them. You even have to be careful not to have the processing running if you use a Stereo adapter such as Behringer UCA-202.

The classic distortion is long sustained musical notes fade and get honky and playing into a rain barrel.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/faq_ ... hancements

You can certainly turn those effects off, but they default on. Even the Mac built-in microphone has one of those suppressors now.

Koz

[Robert2]

Recording streaming audio is as good as I could ever wish on my Windows 10 system. This is done through Audacity and WASAPI, or even better, WDM-KS (in an older version of Audacity).
Of course, all Windows 10 “Sound Enhancements” have to be deactivated. But this is child’s play. Like changing the Desktop Background picture!
Note that I don’t even have a standalone “Sound Card”. My very basic Gigabyte motherboard (Z77DS3H) has built-in High Definition Audio Controller (RealTek Audio Codec ALC887/High quality 108dB SNR HD audio) and my very basic Intel processor (Pentium G2020) has built-in Graphics Controller.
But I do record streaming audio or cassette tapes (through built-in line-in) with very good quality (24bits, 192000Hz), and I export to FLAC.
Robert

[kozikowski]

We don't know what the poster was recording. They didn't say, but the symptoms are perfect for someone trying to record and not knowing about the Windows processing.

They did say they were on a laptop and most of them have no Stereo Line-In. So when the poster writes back and fills in what they were recording and how, we'll be able to help.

Koz