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Is the Line-in Jack On the Verge of Extinction?
SlashD0tter writes "Many older sound cards were shipped with line-out, microphone-in, and a line-in jacks. For years I've used such a line-in jack on an old Windows 2000 dinosaur desktop that I bought in 2000 (600 Mhz PIII) to capture the stereo audio signal from an old Technics receiver. I've used this arrangement to recover the audio from a slew of old vinyl LPs and even a few cassettes using some simple audio manipulating software from a small shop in Australia. I've noticed only recently, unfortunately, that all of the four laptops I've bought since then have omitted a line-in jack, forcing me to continue keeping this old desktop on life support. I've looked around for USB sound cards that include a line-in jack, but I haven't been too impressed by the selection. Is the line-in jack doomed to extinction, possibly due to lobbying from vested interests, or are there better thinking-outside-the-box alternatives available?"
SOLVED.
Now give me +5. Of course, there are many other ways to record a line-in, but it sounds to me like submitter is very finicky and used to doing things one specific way. I have family who use a dual-deck CD burner because they're used to the whole tape-deck way of recording. They would rather make a mix CD by sticking 1 CD at a time and burning track-by-track than simply ripping all of their music to their $800 laptop(which they use only for internet and OpenOffice) and burning mix CD's from the library. I'll get off your lawn now.
SOLVED.
That's sold out, $35 and possibly not available in Australia. However, after viewing that, it has occurred to me what has happened here. The submitter is used to (what I learned to call) RCA jacks in stereo. These I guess are two jacks looking like this. I believe what the submitter needs is only one of these adapters that will run you a few bucks at your local store (unless you're finicky about quality which I'm guessing he's not if he's doing this on that old of a computer).
Yes, the large RCA version of it is going the way of the buffalo and probably has for some time. Similar to the new video out ports looking smaller and smaller but being essentially the same standard.
My work here is dung.
Why do you need two inputs? I highly doubt there's much difference between the line-in jack on your sound card and the stereo microphone jack.
A microphone input is expecting microphone-level signals - not line level. There's a big difference, and without something similar to a DI box to correct the level, all you'll get if you put line level audio into a microphone jack is distorted overdriven noise.
Putting moderation advice in your
Seriously, anyone who can't find analogue sound input for their computer hasn't bothered looking very hard. I can find it for you USB, Firewire, PCI, or PCIe. Stereo, 8 channel, 128 channel, whatever you like. You name the kind of audio capture you need, someone out there makes a product for it. All of them will be better quality than the line-in jack on a laptop, which generally has really poor filtering and thus lots of noise.
The parent is absolutely right in terms of the Behringer as a good, cheap solution. Need something better? You can get something like the M-Audio MobilePre (http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/MobilePreUSB.html) which has pretty good converters and some features you don't need. Still not enough, have to have no holds barred? Get yourself an Benchmark ADC1 (http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/adc1/) converter, which is just about as good as it get.
No matter what the level, from a highly adequate $35 USB audio interface, up to a $1,700 dedicated converter, you can get something that'll meet your needs, and do so online.
The only reason line in is dying on soundcards is people aren't using it much. On laptops, space is also a premium so why bother? Many desktop cards still have it, as they've got the space for more inputs.
The word you're looking for is "gain", not "power". Some microphones also require power (either of the low-voltage "plug-in power" variety or full 48V phantom power), but if you plug those devices into a line input, you'll get no sound at all.
As for the differences in grades of gear, yes, to some degree, that's true, with the caveat that some $10/channel hardware will outperform the $100/channel hardware and other $10/channel hardware will be utter excrement. In the audio space, there's often more correlation between price and marketing costs than between price and product quality, IMHO....
More to the point, the older the gear, the more expensive it has to be before you are likely to get good sound. There are exceptions, but in general, as the costs of the underlying components decrease, it becomes more practical to build higher quality gear for less money. Thus, a recently designed device that costs $50 is likely to sound as good as a ten-year-old device that costs $100. High quality gear gets cheaper to design and build over time. So the high end stuff today might or might not be a great improvement over the midrange stuff today, but either one is going to be a lot better than the midrange stuff from ten years ago, yet both may still be comparable to the high-end gear from ten years ago.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If you have $10 and a soldering iron, you can build a simple voltage divider network, and use that to attenuate the "line out" from your turntable to levels that are appropriate for your "mic in" port. For example, take a 9k ohm and 1k ohm resistor and go across the common and signal wires on your line out, and take the connection between the 2 resistors as the input to your mic in to get 1/10th the voltage of the "line out". These are almost certanly not the right values for the job, but the principle is the same, and will allow you to eliminate the clipping problem.
Microphone port pumps some current into whatever is connected to it (to power the microphone up)
Line In doesn't provide any power, it only analyses incoming signal from external source, and will be often separated through transoptors or the like to protect the hardware from overcurrent from difference of potential between the devices.
Not sure why this was modded +5 informative; it's a load of hooey...
Normal dynamic microphones are passive and do not require any external power to "power the microphone up". They generate a small current, usually from a coil moving inside a magnet. This is why you need a pre-amp of some kind to bring your mic-level signal up to a line-level signal that a regular amp can deal with. Your sound card has this built in.
If you have a condensor microphone, then it will need external power of some kind to function. This usually comes in the form of phantom power (+48V usually) over a balanced twisted pair microphone wire. I can promise you that your average soundcard (and pretty much anything with 1/8" jacks) does *not* supply phantom power. You need an external power supply of some kind to use a condensor mic with your soundcard.
The only real difference between a line in and a mic in on your soundcard is the expected input gain. A mic input has a pre-amp and expects a mic level input. If you feed it a line level input and it doesn't attenuate it (or bypass the preamp) then you'll clip the hell out of the signal.
appleguru.org
However the signal to noise ratio will be horrible because of all the unnecessary gain of the Mic amp stage.
And yes, unless you're hung up on the shape of the little gizmo that plugs into the little hole, every computer from laptop to Mac Pro has a way to input audio (aka "line-in") jack. Sometimes, the jack actually does double duty as mic-in and line in, and the little mixer applet that comes with it will attenuate or boost the signal accordingly.
The trend in the last few years has been to forego the Line-In functionality. Often it's still mentioned in the tech specs, but try finding the software switch for activating the Line-In. Hell, the Realtek audio on my old Toshiba NB100 had a Line-In that only worked with certain driver versions... all of them would give you the pop-up for selecting whether you were using the jack as a line-in or mic-in, but only one of the drivers actually switched to stereo and padded the input (or turned off that nasty nasty preamplification).
I don't get it - these laptops all have microphones built in. Why would you need a godawful preamp built in for an external mic that probably sounds just as crappy? It's not like there are any mics out there that sound any better and have a 1/8" TRS jack...
Now an actual balanced 1/8" TRS connection with phantom power... that I could go for. But this crap is useless. Bring back the line-in and kill mic-in!
I've purchased that turntable, tried it and given it away to an enemy.
I'm not a crazy stereophile by any means, but the quality of this turntable was so poor that you would not use this for any collectible vinyl, or anything worth keeping. The quality of construction is poor, the cartridge is utter crap, it was difficulty to set up the anti-skate, it tracked marginal vinyl not at all. In short, don't get this.
Instead, just buy a used turntable in good condition (so many are available), or I realized my 40 year old Dual turntable ( http://www.dual-reference.com/ ) was still head and shoulders above this unit. Couple it with a reasonable phono preamp ( http://www.zzounds.com/item--ARTDJPREII ) and send it through your line in. Combine it with very nice free software ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download ) and you have a solution, possibly for as little as $50 and you'll have a turntable that won't ruin your good vinyl, and get excellent sound as well.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you