What are you looking at? Well, I recorded a specific small section of a cd - from external cd player(actually a Teac dvd player) - into my 2 preamp inputs. I tried to be as 'scientific' as possible. You can pan these inputs, on input through the controlling software, so I sent them 1 left 1 right, and matched the levels + as loud as possible without clipping. Put it this way: nothing seemed to happen upon normalizing.
Then put the cd player in the comp, and with the same program used to record (soundforge), I "extract(ed) audio from cd".. the exact same part, cut to the exact same size. What I used was Pantera - 13 steps. From the start up to the first repetition of "13.. 13 ..13 ..13... steps"
Black line - digital "extract from cd". White line - cd player routed to inputs.
Then with the 2 wav files I did the spectrum analysis thing, then hit "print screen" for each then merged the 2 pics together with photoshop.
Now, the only other factors: the RCA cables from cd player. The little RCA to 1/4 jack converter on input. And.. the level of the recorded track ended up lower, because it peaked somewhere it shouldn't have. Even just looking at the wavs compared.. it's like the sight of a wav to low-q mp3 compression.
By the way, I recorded at 44,100/16bit
wtf? x43984321
I stuffed this up at first, I don't know how, but it made the cd player line way worse. And I believed it, because all i read is how you have to have this ridiculously priced preamp, and these converters etc. And.. "c'port is crappy blah bla bla"
Now I'm just confused. The graph comparison doesn't really show anything drastic to my eyes.
