_,,,^..^,,,_ said:
I thought to pass the audio from the VCR to my Sony MiniDisc recorder (because it has a really good A/D converter - 20 bit delta-sigma ADC - that I think is really superior to the simple 16 bit audio card of my PC) then feed its digital out to my PC. Is there something like AviSynth median I could use for audio?
I'm happy I decided to drop DScaler and instead use VDub to capture some laserdiscs - at the end, I captured 1 hour with NO frames dropped - just disable the preview... my video experience is slowly growing!
I haven't used my old MiniDisc recorder in many years, can you record to uncompressed PCM or does it compress to ATRAC? If it compresses it you should be better off using the capture card, as you will lose frequencies from your lower fidelity source. Averaging for sound surely does exist but I don't know how you would go about doing it as I've never done it! You would have to line up each recording sample for sample (or as close as you possibly can) for it to work properly, just as you do with multiple video captures, except there are far more samples/second in audio than frames/second in video. Random noise can change the shape of a waveform, making this potentially very difficult from a noisy source, but certainly possible in theory. It would just be easier to run a subtle NR pass with a negligible difference in perceived quality. Perhaps Audacity will do the job in this respect. I'd recommend having a bit of a play with different methods and see what works best, but I'd recommend getting some high quality shielded cables, if you haven't got some already, to reduce line noise from source to capture devices.
Incidentally my capture card keeps reporting no dropped frames in VirtualVCR, but still keeps missing 1 frame on all captures, which means I have to compare, then recapture and splice for that section. I'm a relative newbie to video work too, so its been a good way of learning, although frustrating at times because it means getting a frame-accurate capture takes a lot longer. I did manage to get a nice capture of the PAL laserdisc for ANH after getting a median of 5 captures. I'll give VDub a try and see if it gives better results!