Digitizing cassettes, records and tapes yourself. A little equipment-. Accessories Test. Very inexpensive electronic accessories promise an enfaches. Perfect digitizing of sound carriers. I have some of these "miracle parts" purchased and tested for you, be curious and let us surprise you:
For the cassette digitizing I always used the same – pre-recorded – cassette, to have a fair comparison possibility.
First I have this cassette after "my kind", So I brought it to the PC with my technique, adjusted the level to optimum via the mixing console, transferred it to the hard disk via a high-quality external Terratec sound card and with the Magix software. Playback device was a professional Sony recorder TC-D5 M. This recorder, which was already popular with radio broadcasters at the time, was available in the DM 1000 class and is still sold today for approx. 400 – 500 Euro offered.
The 24 bit WAV file was then shrunk into a 128 kbit/s mp3 file to obtain the same file compression used by the external digitizing devices. The recording was not further processed, because the other devices do not process either.
The recording has been levelled in such a way that there is still "some air" at the top remains, important for possible later processing.
Despite the enormous mp3 – compression to 128 kbit/s, the sound quality is still quite acceptable.
– Listen here times purely !
All this for a material input of about 800 Euro. – That should be cheaper, or ?
Clearly visible – and also audible – the level is much too high, clear distortions are audible. The volume control on my test unit had no influence on this recording level.
Also the dynamic is shrunk to an almost unity level, that is, loud and quiet there is hardly, only uniformly much noise.
Adjusting the volume control on the player also changes the recording level on the USB stick, but during the recording itself you have no direct control, so try it out until it suits you.
However, the belt speed is clearly too high, I have approx. 10 percent more measured.
Listen to here itself !
The Medion MD 83906 record / cassette digitizer is designed for ca. 60 – 80 Euro to have, also under other names and designations. The device saves to USB stick or SD card as mp3 with either 192 or 128 kbit/s. For my test I chose the 128 compression again.
Again, it is possible to automatically cut the recording into tracks and save each track as a separate file. Did not work well with my device, often a few seconds are missing at the beginning of each recording section. So better record all the way through. Cut after with the software.
The padding is not adjustable, goes to the extreme limit, some level peaks are cut off. When post-processing with an audio software is to be considered, otherwise there are still distortions afterwards.
Listen to here the recording !
Less inspiring are the deviations of the tape speed. The cassette page – in the original exactly 37 minutes – is played back with a different tempo each time it is played back, between 37 and 37 minutes.56 minutes and 38.28 minutes. That makes just under 5 percent difference.
From 8 recording attempts I have recorded here 4 results in the picture.
This audio digitizer AD 100 is offered by ELV for 34.95 euros, incl. Netzeil, remote control and various connection cables. Even a german manual is included. Recording on USB stick or SD card is possible, again as 128 kbit/s mp3 file. Track separation is automatically possible, when connecting headphones or active speakers, the dubbing can also be listened to.
Apparently identical devices with other model names are also available for less money from other suppliers.
The high-quality Sony TC-D5 M recorder with the same recorded music cassette was used for the transfer.
Also here, as with the other devices, the USB stick should be freshly formatted, in FAT32 – format, not NTFS.
Should not be a problem.
The level of the finished recording looks ok at first. If you look and listen carefully, you will notice additional tiny "peeks" generated by the adapter on, signal peaks, which are not present in the original picture in such a way. In some of these places there are tiny short glitches in the playback.