Hi, I recently got back into vinyl after a long hiatus and I picked up an ART USB Phono Plus to do some digital conversions. It came with some software but I liked Vinyl Studio better (and it's still being developed) so I bought it. I'm using Win7.
But, even after reading every topic I could find I'm still a bit confused about recording levels. I went through this before - when I bought the box it was incredibly distorted, I thought it was defective, then I saw the levels (with the sider set to 100) were pegged. The manual recommends setting the slider at 4, and I'd seen elsewhere online to set it at 5. I was using the latter because it seemed to be a good level without distorting.
Then, I got VS, and when I hit "Set digital gain to 1" it set the slider to 3. First, I wanted to confirm that is the intended result. Second, why 3? Is that documented somewhere (by Microsoft) or did you determine it empirically? Just to be pedantic - this should mean that whatever numeric value the ADC on the device is producing is exactly the numeric value received by VS and encoded in the WAV file, right?
When I have the level set to 3, the levels seem really low, like the peak absolute sample values are in the range of 22k, whereas with the level set to 5 (comparing the same album) they are right below clipping (32k), which I think makes sense since 3/5 of 32k is ~20k and I may have messed with the gain control on the device. I could feed in a constant tone and try some experiments...
About that gain control, it is on the USB Phono+ itself, as well as a Signal/Clip light. The manual has the (dubious?) advice "Adjust the Gain Trim while noting the Signal/Clip LED so that green is on most of the time (with music playing) and red is on rarely during signal peaks." I say "dubious" because f it's really a "clip" LED, I wouldn't want it to be red at all. I'm trying to adjust it so it stays green, but I do see it flash red very occasionally.
But, putting those things together, does that mean when the LED on the device flashes red, the ADC in the device is really only outputting ~20k and there's still plenty of headroom? So, I should turn up the gain rather than messing with the slider or normalizing?
Sorry, this got way longer than I intended, just trying to understand exactly what is happening...