Audio static when recording from old school consoles

[mothdad666]

Hey everyone very new here so sorry if this has been asked before but I am having an issue when recoding from my ps1 & others that there is a loud static sound in the recording this is from a ps1 & dreamcast via hdmi converter to el gato game capture card to a old laptop.
Originally when recording I had no sound coming through said laptop but it was capturing the audio crystal clearly but I am unsure of what I changed to have it play through the laptop which created this issue.

I have attached two videos to demonstrate this. Any help is greatly apricated.

 

[AaronD]

The attachments didn't come through. Might be a size limit? Try uploading somewhere else and then posting a link here.

Anyway, my first guess is that you're using Composite video (Yellow RCA plug), and the color codes are wrong. Video interpreted as audio sounds horrible!

TRRS ("headphone plug") adapters are perhaps the worst for this. It's a convenient small plug that can carry Composite video and stereo audio...but there's no actual standard for what the 'phone plug should be in that case. (or the manufacturers just do what they want anyway) As long as you use the original manufacturer's specific adapter, all is well, but if you use a different one (maybe you lost it or never had one, and you grabbed one from Amazon or whatever), there are several ways it could be wrong. Some are simply a plug-swap, so that the color code is wrong but it works; others are hopeless and you need to try (or make) a different adapter.

 

[mothdad666]

Here is the videos sorry first recording is good audio from capture but no audio playing from the laptop and second is the opposite
Thank you

2024-11-09 22-05-46

This is "2024-11-09 22-05-46" by miles gilmour on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

vimeo.com

2024-11-09 22-58-06

This is "2024-11-09 22-58-06" by miles gilmour on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

vimeo.com

 

[AaronD]

Okay, so it's not what I thought. All of your signals are mapped correctly; you just have noise in your audio.

Sounds to me like data-compression artifacts. What's your audio bitrate?

The increasing volume of that at the end, as the actual content falls away, also suggests that you might have some analog electronic noise ("background hiss") and a dynamic range compressor.

A compressor lowers the volume for loud things while keeping the volume up for quiet things. A side effect of that, is that it raises the noise floor during what would otherwise be quiet. Nothing is magic.

Also, white noise (the kind of electronic noise that is left over when everything else is right, and you can't completely get rid of) is effectively random. Random does not encode very well, and so it produces data-compression artifacts more than pretty much anything else at the same volume.

If that's your problem, then the way to solve it is to slam the intended signal as loud as it will go without distorting, everywhere that you can, and only turn it down at the very last possible moment, which would be the speakers or headphones themselves. That doesn't eliminate the noise, but it does drown it out; and the lower volume setting later in the chain to make the slammed signal okay, also turns the noise down.

And don't use any more processing than you absolutely have to. Filters, complex routing, etc. Disable everything, and then delete it if it still sounds okay.