How good is 2-channel audio captured via laptop?

riredale wrote on 2/22/2003, 2:53 PM
This is my first post in this board, so please forgive my simple question.

I am purchasing a Dell laptop next week, and am hoping to use it, along with VV3, to capture clean 2-channel audio of my daughter's choir trip to Austria this summer. The question is, just how clean is audio captured via the mic-in or line-in on a typical laptop? If the s/n ratio is terrible (and I suspect it is), is there a cheap way to capture audio with a laptop? I have seen the "Mona" interface, but those solutions are still many hundreds of dollars and involve carrying around a big box.

Presently I am using the miniDV camera audio tracks, but there is motor noise, and even if I use a separate mic, the camera does a lot of compression that I can't override. Some people use $200 minidisk recorders, but since I am getting a laptop anyway I want to find some way to use it for this purpose, if possible.

Any ideas?

Comments

XOG wrote on 2/22/2003, 7:51 PM
I've found that noise on mic and line input is affected by the level at which my Win2000 mixer levels are set. I've currently got a noise floor of -50dB on mic and -72dB on line. Will play more with this.

xog