Imported Stereo Audio sounds diffused

[Jeremy Mix3000]

Hello everyone.

I'm having a problem with imported Stereo Audio. Quite oftem I will do a mix which has a Stereo Instrumental Track premixed and several accapella vocal tracks. Sometimes these tracks are done on another DAW so I have to do the old trick of creating long .WAV files of each track with the same start point and then line them up at the beginning in PT. When I import the stereo track and place it in PT... Pan it hard left and right... It sounds diffused, almost out of phase. The kick has less focus and lacks "Punch" as compared to the original audio CD of the SAME track.

So... the question is. Why is it that when I import a stereo audio file (even from an audio CD) it sounds worse than the original ? I mean if this is an All-Digital process there should be no degradation of sound, no change in phase relationship, etc.

[Stig Eliassen]

Can you give some info about your setup, including hardware and software version?
Have you tried zooming in down to sample level and check what's going on?
Do you have ADC enabled?

A quick comparison test you can try...record the outputs of a cd player into PT and compare it against the imported tracks. How did that turn out?

[Monte McGuire]

My dumb guess is that you have some sort of sample rate conversion happening upon import and you're not using the highest quality options for that. Low quality SRC can add some of the same artifacts you describe.

In the preferences, you can set the SRC quality. I'd suggest using the 'tweakhead' setting unless you have an impossibly old computer. But, just to see if we're even barking up the right tree, what does the info window in the import dialog tell you when you import these files? Are they being converted? Is the sample rate of the imported files the same as the sample rate of the session? If not, why not!


Regards,

-monte-

[Jeremy Mix3000]

I think the biggest problem here is that the original tracks were not recorded in Pro Tools. I don't have the original CD's of the .WAV Files or Audio "Rough Mix" so I can't go back and Re-Import the tracks.... I'm pretty sure they were 16 bit 44.1 but they may have been 48k... My session was 16 bit 44.1 I did check my prefs and the import quality was set to "Better" not "TweakHead" so that could have been the problem. I guess that when his DAW program splits his Stereo file into two Mono files and then I Put them back together in PT something gets Lost-In-Translation......

I always recommend Pro Tools to the people I work with. That way I can just open the session and Roll......

Oh..... You lost me on "ADC" ??? What is ADC ?

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll let ya'll know when I get it figured out.

[minister]

Oh..... You lost me on "ADC" ??? What is ADC ?

Automatic Delay Compensation.

HD only, not LE.

[Improv]

I'm curious to see if you've tried split mono tracks instead of a stereo track? There's a mini debate about an audible difference between the two at my studio. Try it and see if it makes a difference

[Jeremy Mix3000]

Yes ADC is enabled. Split Stereo vs. Stereo Interleaved..... I'l have to give that another listen... Should be no difference.
The mix is being done on HD2 Accell, G4, PT 6.9.3cs4, OSX 10.4.2