In my last post on this forum I noted that I had purchased two hard drive enclosures from endpcnoise.com but that I had not had time to install them. As of last week that had changed and I must admit that the noise reduction appears to be much better than I expected. I turned the computer on early last Sunday morning when the ambient noise is pretty low, and given what I heard, or maybe I should say what I did not hear, has made me somewhat optimistic that during the winter months, when the ambient noise is at it's lowest, that the computer acoustic noise will be low enough to suite me.
The enclosures are about $50.00 each, don't look like much, but they appear to do the job.
In addition, thanks to the meters present on my soundcard software, I have observed that some of my newer jazz recordings are going above the 0dbfs level. This is an "illegal" state according to the Sony Redbook rules, but that doesn't seem to be paid much attention to these days. What many people need to understand is that when ever you force a digital filter and DAC to go above 0dbfs you will get gross distortion. Some digital filters will clip anything over 0dbfs and the ones that have some amount of headroom will still exhibit gross distortion.
For those recordings that go above the 0dbfs level often enough to be annoying I am using my winamp digital volume control to reduce the level by 3 db. I also adjust my analog volume control to compensate for this. The reduction of 3db in digital level is confirmed by the meter in the software and even though I will lose 3db of dynamic range I find the lack of the gross distortion to be more beneficial.
For those of you that have this option I must reinforce that this will only work as desired if the attenuation comes before any digital filter.
d.b.
