HW: Calvert experiment

[Tim Gadd]

I've just put up a short excerpt of the Calvert tape as a real audio file,
to see whether it's of acceptable sound quality, so any comments welcome.

Bear in mind that the original was made on a portable tape deck, using a
cheap microphone, and there is heaps of level fluctuation and
over-recording. Most of the distortion you hear is in the original - at
least the distortion during peak levels. However, if you're getting
distortion at lower volume levels, I'd be interested to know. I don't have
my computer hooked up to a decent sound system.

I have basically just added treble eq to the original recording (because you
lose quite a lot of treble transferring from wav to realaudio) then used a
noise gate to get rid of a little hiss (personally I'd rather have some hiss
than a heavily clipped sound) The wav.file sounded fine, but in converting
it to .rm format a phased effect seems to have crept in. There doesn't seem
to be a lot I can do about this. I'm recording at voice 28.8K setting.
Switching to music setting at a higher resolution actually worsens the
effect. On my computer speakers the effect isn't terribly noticeable, but if
it sounds dreadful with some decent amplification, tell me.

The main reason I'm checking though, is just to see if I'm going to need to
cut back on the original recording level. The .wav version was fine, but
transferring it to .rm jacks everything up considerably, and I was
red-lining a lot of the time, even though it doesn't seem to show up in
playback too much.

Some comments on this should allow me to define the settings to go ahead and
transfer the whole interview, bit by bit. Remember, the original is pretty
rough, so it's never going to be anywhere near perfect, but I can try not to
keep the recording artefacts which I introduce to a minimum.

Anyway, it's at

http://www.faof.org/~lupercal/radio/calvert/bob.html
--
Tim Gadd
Hobart, Tasmania