[LAU] Suggestions on how to improve quality of recordings?

[david]

Each Sunday, my church's band records the service. The recording is done 
  to an IBM Thinkpad laptop via a 16-channel USB device of some sort 
that takes in raw audio signals and digitizes them while they pass 
through to the mixer. The laptop receives the digitized audio as data 
over USB, where it's recorded to the hard drive.

Oh, we also have an audio processor box of some sort that does a bit of 
compression or some other processing on just the voices. I don't know if 
the input that the computer is getting has gone through the audio 
processor before getting to the computer or not. The guy who's doing the 
mixing says he adds compression, typically.

If you listen to a few of the recordings here:

http://www.clanjones.org/stnicks/music/

You can get an idea of some of the quality we're getting now.

Our former drummer and saxophonist, who has a hearing loss of some sort, 
mixes the raw tracks down to what you hear there. He's doing it under 
Windows XP, I forget what program he uses. He's offered to make the 
tracks available to me for mixing, but I don't have the disk space or 
time to do it ... I'm the only Linux user in the bunch, the rest are 
still enslaved in the Matrix ;-)

We've been told by many people that the sound people hear from the main 
speakers is fine - but us in the band have no idea what it sounds like. 
The guy doing our mixing says he is trying to mix it to match what he 
hears from the mains.

Anyway, suggestions? My experience with recording anything was back in 
the early 70's in a garage band environment!

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community