Hello everyone

[jtcats]

Hi everybody,

I'm happy to join this forum and learn new things about audio and video. I'm a casual listener and I watch too much tv (my wife says). :p I'm presently thinking about copying my old cassette tapes to my Mac. In my younger days, I recorded a bunch of tapes from records and the radio. In order to record them to digital, I'm bidding on a tape deck on ebay - a Denon DN-720R HX Pro Stereo Cassette Tape Deck G.

It's supposed to be in good working condition and since it is a pro rack model, I hope it was built fairly strong so it will still perform capably. Anyone have experience with this model? Thanks for any comments.

I downloaded Audacity to convert to digital but I have no experience with this program. It will be a learning experience. I hope the quality of the sound is ok. I don't need perfection because I wear hearing aids but I am a little picky being a former electrical engineer.

John

[audioasis7]

Hi JT,
I'm afraid I know nothing about the Denon unit, but I suggest you consult a couple of good pro audio-related forums on that Just wanted to address your 2nd question though. I've been active in high end audio for 27 years, and know a bit about hearing loss, simply from being a retired nurse + general medical-text reading since then. But I'm afraid the answer to your question as to how much difference you may or may not hear in quality between one file format and another, there's actually a whole lot of factors involved that determine that, even for people with excellent hearing...excellent in terms of what an audiologist will measure. You have to experiment with different file formats yourself to see how much difference you notice in the playback from, say, 3 different digital formats, or at least 2. Keep in mind that you may upgrade your playback equipment someday, and if the upgrade is by a significant margin, you'll be appreciating a pretty notable difference then, even if you don't through the equipmt. you have now. The only rule of thumb is to stay totally away from "regular" 16kbs MP3s. Storage space is so extremely cheap these days, so try to at least use 64kbs MP3s, if you must use them at all. High end audio freaks like me all store music in .Flac format, though you can't listen to a .flac directly-- you have to convert it over to a WAV or (in your case) an AIIF file before you can play it. For us, it's well worth it.
Audacity is OK as long as you can get the current edition to interface well with whichever Apple OS you have, and as long as your hardware isn't growing buggy. You may find after a while that you need something a bit more stable that has auto-updates for Apple and has extra features you might want, which usually means spending between $20 and $35, or so. Good luck.

[Mr Peabody]

Welcome to AR. I'm not familiar with the unit you are bidding on but in general Denon makes some good stuff. Your project sounds like a lot of time but to have your music more accessible and convenient could be worth it.

[JoeE SP9]

Another welcome to AR.

I too have been "ripping" CD's to a music server. So far I've got almost 1K of my CD library stored on a Terabyte HDD. When done I'll start on my LP library. It's going to take a while (3 times more LP's). I'm still deciding what resolution and sampling rate to use when ripping my LP's. It's likely that I'll go with 24/96. The test rips I've been doing seem to sound very good. Besides, it would be much more expensive to go higher. I'll be keeping all my CD's and LP's so if the future provides the ability to make better rips I'll still have my original source material.

[winston]

Hi everybody,

I'm happy to join this forum and learn new things about audio and video. I'm a casual listener and I watch too much tv (my wife says). :p I'm presently thinking about copying my old cassette tapes to my Mac. In my younger days, I recorded a bunch of tapes from records and the radio. In order to record them to digital, I'm bidding on a tape deck on ebay - a Denon DN-720R HX Pro Stereo Cassette Tape Deck G.

It's supposed to be in good working condition and since it is a pro rack model, I hope it was built fairly strong so it will still perform capably. Anyone have experience with this model? Thanks for any comments.

I downloaded Audacity to convert to digital but I have no experience with this program. It will be a learning experience. I hope the quality of the sound is ok. I don't need perfection because I wear hearing aids but I am a little picky being a former electrical engineer.
John
hi John, welcome to AR "did you win that bid? if some one beat you to it, you could this from jr.comhttp://www.jr.com/pyle/pe/PYL_PT659DU/ I don't own one myself, but it just might work if your not too too picky:idea: again welcome to AR and good luck.