it's just a cable it doesn't look like
it's gonna work...
I often see people asking for advice on
how to convert their old records and
tapes
into digital form and you'd think the
ideal answer would be to purchase a new
record player or cassette player
with a USB output but the problem with
that is
unless you're willing to spend hundreds
of dollars the quality of the equipment
available today to do that
often leaves a lot to be desired and you
may already have on hand
a perfectly good cassette player or
turntable
and you're just looking for some way to
connect it to your computer
and that's where USB audio capture
devices come in
there's plenty of them available on the
market today and most of them follow a
very similar design
with a box with a couple cables coming
out of it but then I came across this
which claims to do the same thing: This
is the ClearClick
Audio2USB cable currently available
for $17.95 on Amazon
and as you can see on one end is a 3.5
millimeter
audio plug and on the other end
is a USB plug and there's nothing else
to it --
just a cable. So apparently whatever
conversion this does is all within this
little plug here
which is not much larger than a
standard USB
plug and in case your audio device
requires a different type of connection
it comes with a couple adapters
first is this 1/4-inch adapter which
converts it to the larger style
of headphone jack and also this adapter
which again doesn't really look like
it's gonna work
looks like two RCA plugs
and one RCA jack on this end so you
would think this is just converting a
stereo
RCA connection to mono but actually this
is not an RCA
connection -- the 3.5 mm
plugs into that and this gives you your
left and right
RCA connections for any kind of audio
device that has
RCA jacks on it. The only problem is it
doesn't
indicate which one is the left audio
plug and which one is the right audio
plug
so you have to figure that out on your
own and of course
these are a fixed distance apart so it
may or may not work with all audio
devices
depending on the separation between its
RCA jacks
in addition to the cable itself and
these two adapters I showed it also
includes this quick start guide
which I'm happy to say is written in
proper English and actually does contain
some helpful advice
it claims to work with both a Windows PC
and a Mac
and it also includes this software CD
which is going to have a copy of
Audacity on it which is the very popular
free audio recording and conversion
software
but in case your computer doesn't have
an optical drive
you can download that for free online.
To test this
out I have a couple of cassette tapes
and records I'm going to convert.
I have an inexpensive portable cassette
recorder
a higher quality component stereo tape
deck
and a turntable with a built-in preamp
and a fairly typical laptop computer
running Windows 7
Home Premium. First i'm going to plug
this cable into the computer and see
what happens
I did not install this previously so
hopefully it'll just
install the drivers on its own. It took a
while but it finished loading all the
drivers
and it's telling us we need to restart. So I
restarted Windows and now
in the Control Panel under the sound
recording
devices it added what it calls a
microphone array USB plug and play audio
device
it set itself to the default device
which is good
now I'll go into properties and see what's
going on here
the level is set halfway, at 51 out of 100
it's at the 2 channel 16 bit
48 kHz
DVD quality which is good because some
of these USB
devices set themselves to mono
1 channel and you have to go into this
Control Panel and change it to
2 channel
but this one came set to 2 channel so
we should be good to go to record with
it. Now instead of using
Audacity I'm going to use another free
audio recording
program called OcenAudio. Just one
thing I did before we
start our recording is I went into the
Control Panel
under the sound recording settings
go to Properties, Listen, and then
enable listen to this device so we can
actually hear what it's recording
so I have it connected to my cassette
recorder and this
is a mono cassette recorder so when
we're recording the audio into the
computer
you'll only see and hear it coming out
of one of the channels but I'll show you
how to easily fix that once we're done
all I have to do now is hit record in
OcenAudio. It gives us a couple choices
here of different settings but the
defaults are fine so I'll just hit OK
and now OcenAudio is recording so I
just have to hit play
on my cassette recorder...
so I finished my sample recording and
now you can see the waveform is only in
one channel
but there's an easy way to fix that you
just go to Edit
and then Convert to Mono and now it's a
single
mono waveform and now I'll save this to
a file on my computer I'll go to
File, Export
and it gives us different choices here
I'll use WAV
I'll hit OK and it saved that
recording
so now I'll play it back and I'll edit
into the video
the direct recording we made so you'll
hear a direct hookup of it
instead of hearing it come through my
speakers...
I think that sounded fine, but a mono
voice recording
made on a portable cassette recorder
like this is not exactly a very
high fidelity audio sample so I brought
out my higher quality
stereo cassette deck this is a TEAC
W-890R
this deck has RCA audio jack outputs and
it just so happens that this adapter
which came with the cable
fits and works fine with it and I've
actually tried this with several
different audio components and on every
single one of them
it fit fine so I guess there actually
must be some kind of industry standard
of the spacing between the two jacks and
I did some tests and I figured out which
one of the plugs are the left and right
channels
and I added my own little sticker to
remind me
so now I can connect it to the audio
cable and
plug it into the cassette deck and
because it has a higher output level
than the earphone jack of that portable
cassette recorder
I needed to go into the recording
properties in the Control Panel
and reduce the recording level from its
default of 51
down to 10 to prevent the audio from
overloading and distorting when I'm
recording it into the computer
depending on the output level of the
device you have it connected to
you'll need to experiment with that
recording level control
to find the optimum setting where it's
not
constantly peaking in the red zone. It's
OK if it goes there once in a while
but it should not be
reaching that level continuously and
I'll be playing a recording I made from
the radio
in 1999...
now I have it connected to this Audio-
Technica AT-LP60X turntable
this turntable has a built-in pre-amp
which means we can
connect it directly to the audio cable
going into the computer
so to enable the built-in pre-amp on a
turntable like this
make sure the switch is set to Line
rather than Phono
and this one makes it easy to connect to
this cable because it has a
3.5 mm jack
so I can just plug it in directly and
for our dancing and listening pleasure
we'll be hearing a little bit of music
from the Ken-Tones...
and you may think having the audio
conversion circuitry
in the USB plug may make it prone to
picking up
interference from the computer. So to
test that I connected it to my portable
cassette recorder again
but I'm not going to be playing anything
I'll just have it recording
silence so we'll be able to hear how
silent that actually is
or if there's some background noise it's
picking up and I set the recording level
back to the default
of 51 which is really as high as you'll
ever need
because as I showed earlier for most
standard line-level audio sources
you'll need to turn it down to 10 or
even less
so now I'll start recording a couple
seconds of what should be
silence and then I'll play it back so
you can hear how silent
it actually is...
so that's about it for the ClearClick
Audio2USB cable
this is not a sponsored review or
anything like that -- I just happened to
notice the unusual design
of this product and decided to pick one
up and see how well it works
and it turns out it works fine. I don't
know if there's
any real advantage to this design
compared to the ones that have the box
in the middle
but this certainly looks interesting
because it's just a cable
and he wouldn't think it would work,
but it does