Greetings. The most probable reason for the lack of bass on copying from a vinyl might be the frequency design of vinyl players' heads. The piezo-electric heads have their whole frequency region over in the highs, but i assume it is not the case here, so you probably used a magnetic head. However. "The phonograph recordings are made with high frequencies boosted. This reduces background noise, including clicks or pops, and also conserves the amount of physical space needed for each groove, by reducing the size of the larger low-frequency undulations." ( a slight quote here...). So, the actual recording off a vinyl disk requires a very careful frequency adjustments. When i did such an operation, i used a preamp specifically designed for this purpose. Without a proper load-preamp between the player and recorder - it will be practically impossible to get a right frequencies balance. It is much more simple operation to plug in a preamp, then to try to level out frequencies after such a "crooked" recording is already made. The USB turntables get plentiful complaints of not taking this fact into account, sorry to say. Acoustical - is our area, as lute players? anyway? This being said - to Audacity! To get a proper volume - use "Normalize" button, normalize to about - 0.8 db for anything else, and probably to - 3 for lute music? To process frequencies, you have to use EQ . In Audacity EQ is available only from plugins. Usually the Download sites for Audacity also include the LADSPA plugins installer.After installing these, there are a few EQs with multiple bands. In a little more detail, open the recorded file (or say, it is already opened, as freshly recorded), select all the needed area to be EQed, choose the EQ plugin from the list and process.
Ron Fletcher Sun, 23 Nov 2008 07:34:56 -0800 Hi Stephen et al, I have used Audacity to copy vinyl> MP3> CD but found the end result has very little bass to it. There is no bass-setting on my USB-turntable. So the settings on the stereo only enhance the audio output from the turntable. The USB-cable goes direct into the PC. Bass just isn't there when it comes to playback as MP3, or on the CD-player. The treble is nice and clear and not what we call 'toppy'. Consequently, after I have used the CD-player for regular disks, the bass is set too high and has to be set back to normal. The volume is also less from an Audacity recording, but I can cope with that. Volume seems to be the only feature that can be manually set in Audacity. If there is another user out there, is there any control on the bass/treble in the Audacity recording set-up? I would like a pointer in that direction. It could be useful for others on this list considering copying their old vinyl recordings to CD. Best Wishes Ron (UK) To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
