Thinkpads Forum

My T30 embedded mic was always excellent for voice recording, ip-phone, etc..

But last week there was necesary of some more quality recording and I analyzed its frequency response.
And discovers that it totally cuts away all freqs higher than 8Khz.
Ok, it's good decision from IBM engineers, in voice recording there are no needs in those frequencies - and it provides great noise removal effects, especially in noises from fans or disk drives.

Then I plugged in mic input external microphone with good characteristics - and discover the same low-pass filter..

It dissapoints me, because I've planned to use this laptop occasionally as wav-recorder with relatively good specs..

Is there are any workaround with this, or I have to buy external mic amplifier and use line input?
And - this issue concerns to mic inputs in all IBM models or even in other laptop brands?

By the way, solved it a long ago.

It was just a checkbox "Mic noise removal" in SoundMax driver panel.

8 kHz sounds very reasonable for any but high-quality, Hi-Fi audio recording (CD quality) for which I doubt any regular PC (not to mention laptop) are intended for.

I run now certain project that processes digital camera audio recorded signal in certain manner and albeit it is nativly sampled at CD-standard 44.1kHz (producing an effectiv band of about 22 kHz - Nyquist). I deliberately decimate it to twice as slow rate (fs = 22050 Hz) prior to my processing thereby reducing the bandwidth to about 11 kHz and consider it good enough for even relatively high quality sound (not for a classic music though....)

for which I doubt any regular PC (not to mention laptop) are intended for.

but I'm still trying.)

By the way, embedded soundcard isn't so bad as I think - I've tested it with RMAA in loopback test (cable lineout-linein) - and it shows good enough results.

Other advantages are uncompressed sound and almost unlimited recording length.
Of course, pro audio recording equipment are better, but I don't need it yet. And the price is counts, yep.

Maybe, external soundcard will be much better, who knows.

Well, for my humble needs for PC audio which is much more then enough. I never considered PC audio for anything but these funny AVI clips you recieve almost daily in emails and probably voice conversations with friends overseas (though MSN Messanger or similar)...nothing more..

Ok, but even internal 7.1 sound in recent mainboards sometimes reaches the quality level of SB Live! (except of CPU load and some features).
And sound from Audigy2 ZS is better than from typical home music system.

What about laptop - for a long time I search for cheap, amateur recording solution. For example, keepmass or iriver mp3-players can record to mp3 from linein and even mic input, but I don't like the quality - even in 256kbps mode there are frequency loss and some sound artifacts.
Maybe, mini-disk player will be better, but there are compression, too, and troubles with transferring on computer.

Your best bet is to buy a Creative Audigy 2ZS PCMCIA card
and use that for your high quality recordings.
The audio quality of that card is VERY impressive.