I finally got all of the recording settings to my digital VCR setup to where they were generally acceptable a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, as with any other tinkering type hobby, I feel the need to make it "a little bit better."

I have been trying to find a way to make the sound portion of my capture smaller since it is currently almost of equal size to the video portion. I am recording with MS MPEG4v2 at 4500. I have the sound set to 32000 16bit mono.

I have tried a few of the audio compression settings and codecs on my machine, but I find that anything other than the PCM 16bit setting results in a sound quality that is poor. The biggest problem is that in much of the dialog, it almost sounds as though a brush being hit on a drum has been mixed in with the sound. I don't know how to explain it other than that. It occures in the MPEG3 codec I tried, the ADPCM, and even the PCM 8 bit has the same quality to it. It really gets on my nerves and I can't listen to more than about 5 minutes before I have to turn it off.

Has anyone else experienced this? It doesn't sound like clipping to me and it doesn't have that quality when I record in PCM 16bit, just the compressed audio codecs or PCM 8bit.

I have also tried converting the sound using Virtual Dub after recording instead of doing it real time, but it has the same effect.

If I encode a recorded video with an uncompressed PCM 16bit sound track using TPMG, it does NOT have this problem.

Thanks for any input.