I also bought myself an expansion board for my AKAI S2000
(IB-208P) with 8-channel analogue output and digital 'coax'
in/out, to work with digital-to-digital sampling. It has no
loss of quality. The sample will stay exactly the same as on
the cd.
You have two kinds of SP-DIF connectors : the coax one, looks
like a cinch connector, and the optical one, that works with
a light signal and therefore you need a special fibreglass
cable.
The expansion board has a coax SP-DIF and the quality is better
than the optical SP-DIF connector. There is no loss of digital
information, which means 100% copy of the CD. If you stream
audio cd's with your PC you will lose data about 10 to 15%.The PC is not really a music computer, it's simply not built for audio information. To stream correctly without interruption of the main ship you need a non calibrated harddisc ; the Audio- Visual (AV) disc. It calibrates only when streaming of data stops. Also for video we have this problem ; you don't want to miss some pictures when you are streaming video.
SCSI integrated in the mainboard works like the AV harddisk,
when you are streaming you don't miss data because of
calibration. For data this is normal. When you write data to
another place it will verify the data. If it's missing some bits
it will give an error massage. For an Audio system this is fatal.
No matter how fast your computer will be, you always lose data
on it. If the audio bits have been converted to sample data
(datafiles) you don't have this problem anymore, because it
is already streamed.
Sampling digital, so with no loss of dynamics, does not shorten a perfect sample. You need a few things to make your sets perfect : 1. Noise reduction and improving the dynamics : For this I use the program WAVCLEAN.exe. A very simple program to remove only the noise and improve the dynamics. This noise reduction is very smart, it will not affect your sample. Try out yourself, it's shareware for short samples.
WAVclean 'launder' Waves and leaves the sample intact, try it ! WAVclean is SHAREWARE. Unregistered version of WAVclean cannot launder Waves longer than 15 seconds.
- WAVclean-setup.zip >>> (2.403Mb)
* Mediafire Download * * Google Drive Download *
2. A bad noisy soundcard : It sounds funny but you need a bad sound card to hear the real sample data. For this I use a two time oversampling card so I hear the 'naked' sound data. On my AKAI even bad samples sounds great. For my sample sets I'll use only the clean and dynamic samples, the rest I'll delete.
3. Good selection by trying out : Now the last test : will it sound still great when you try out your sample set with midi? Sometimes sounds are to short or not useful for your sets. Well, cut them out and load new samples on top of them.
Succes!!! MNX2010