Advice with church sermons, cassettes, and digitizing please

Frangible

Enlightened
Joined
Jun 19, 2003
Messages
789
Hey,

I could use some advice/help with assisting my church's recording and distribution of sermons and service audio content if anyone could, as audio, especially analog / pro stuff isn't my forte.

Right now we use a wireless mic on the pastor, mics at the band area, and this is combined in a sound closet (somehow, it looked like a space shuttle control panel), and then recorded using a tape deck.

The tape deck, I can't recall the brand (didn't recognize it), but it said "professional" on it, and had Dolby B, Dolby C, and Dolby HX. Dolby B was being used.

The tapes used as masters are Type I / normal bias, 90 min. We only have about a year's worth of tapes and reuse old ones so I want to get them digitized before they're lost forever.

From there the tapes are copied using a Sony high-speed autocopier which looks like vintage 70s technology. It's mono only and I believe only Type I cassettes, I didn't see any setting for other cassette types and it didn't appear to have the auto type sensors.

So, here's the list of issues:

1. The volume from the pastor's voice mic is low, about -15 dB peak and -35 dB RMS according to Sound Forge, after piping them into my computer using an SB Audigy with line-in volume set to 80%.

2. The volume from the music is too loud; it appears clipped on the tape, and is 0 dB peak and -10 dB RMS according to SF which really overwhelms the pastor's voice.

3. When I try to clean up the tapes in Sound Forge I have to do so manually-- none of the auto scripts seem able to recognize the difference between music and speech, and due to the music being too loud the pastor's speech is actually reduced in volume further.

4. I considered making a direct copy at the audio cabinet with my portable MP3 player's line-in, but the "range" on it before it starts to clip is worse than the cassette recorder's, and so even though the freq response and S:N is better the overall audio is worse.

So anyway, here's my questions:

1. How do I go about fixing the volume levels in the closet? What tools do I need to measure the volume levels? What should they be? (Sound Forge says -0.9 to -2 dB peak, and -10 dB RMS speech, and -16 dB RMS music).

2. Will different types of tape result in better sound quality for speech vs. Type I? Unfortunately due to existing inventories of type 1 tapes and budgetary issues I don't think we could upgrade anything but the masters.

3. You can get pro tape decks on eBay / 2nd hand for crazy cheap now... is it worth the money to purchase a new deck for them with Dolby S? Right now it's set to Dolby B for recording, and appearently Dolby C sounds bad unless your playback deck supports Dolby C too. Is Dolby S better or worse than Dolby B in recording, assuming the home user's playback only supports Dolby B?

4. Is that high-speed copier killing the quality? Does anyone know much about mass / high speed tape duplication here? What would happen with types of tape other than Type I? How much noise, quality loss, is introduced here? Is it worth it for me to buy a more modern copier for them?

5. How do I clean / service the church's cassette recorder and high-speed copier? I don't think either have been cleaned in years.

6. There is a notebook used for powerpoints during sermons that ultimately I think they'd prefer do digital recordings as well; how can I set this up, such that a lay person could easily make a digital recording without much more difficulty than the cassette equipment? We can't afford the bandwidth costs for hosting the audio on the website right now, but I think we'd like to do something with these eventually. I just don't know a good, really easy to do, streamlined way to record and archive here.

Ideally I think they'd just plug the cord into the notebook, and the recording software would be smart about synching to a certain dB level in the signal, then when they stop recording, it would encode it as a compressed audio file and archive it based on the date and time of the service for easy management in the future. I don't know how to do this without a multi-step process that would probably confuse most people.

7. Any ideas on low-budget hosting for audio files for our website? Right now a member is hosting the site out of his own pocket, and he doesn't have the bandwidth for audio and the church budget can't afford to take over the costs. It's not going to be GB/month or anything. I don't recall how many members total we have but we have 2 services on Sunday with about 100 and 50 people attending, respectively. So I just can't see it being super-high traffic...

Anyway, thanks for any help/advice. I appreciate it.
 
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