Bad audio quality after encoding

[Phoebos]

After capturing (VHS2DVD) and converting with TMPGEnc , audio quality is bad no matter if I choose 192 or 128 or 112 for audio bitrate. And Im not talking about hi fi music but for dialogues in family footage etc. I was expecting just not to have such a difference or slight distortion in some cases. Do u know what I need to do? I use the tooLame as plug in in TMPGenc because as everybody says TMPGenc is a bad encoder for audio.

Thank you in advance

[guns1inger]

I would not go below 192 for audio, even if it is stereo.
What are you encoding to ? (LPCM, MPeg1-Layer2)
Have you the facilities to try encoding to AC-3 ?

[bugster]

What is the quality of the audio on the capture before encoding with TmpGenc. How was it captured, what format, sampling rate, bitrate etc.

Help us to help you.

[Phoebos]

You are right that the info was incomplete

I capture PAL VHS tapes with a FlyTV Platinum card (chipset Philips 7133) in avi with huffyuv codec using capturing feature of MainConcept . The sound option is for mono (since the source is mono) 16 bit, 48000 (for DVD compliance)
The sound card is the one coming with the Compac Evo type PC, meaning that I m aware that is not a good one but the avi is with decent sound, not very good but decent.

I encode with the TooLame plug-in in TMPGenc , Mpeg layer2 (living in a PAL coyntry) and I have tried mono (for saving HDD space) , 192, 128, or even 112 because the footage is not for music but simple enviromental sounds, people's talking etc.

I am not having exptectations for spectacular results but only for a decent sound in mpeg as in the avi, the voices of familiar persons to be recognisable, with no distortion etc

I dont know if any kind of filter would improve the situation, or any other method of the encoding of sound

Thank you again

[bugster]

Only thing I can think of at the moment to try is this:

Open the avi in goldwave. Copy the mono soundtrack and duplicate it to make it stereo. Save this audio as a wav file. Use this wav file as the audio source when encoding in tmpgenc. Try it with a short clip and see if it helps.

[Phoebos]

Ok thanks a lot, I will do that trick

[funkguy4]

try capturing @ the default sampling rate of VHS tapes (2205Hz i believe? perhaps someone can confirm/correct me)

then use something known to upsample well to go to 48000Hz (such as GoldWave)

make sure you're not changing the sample rate when you pass it to tooLame again through TMPGEnc.

[mpack]

try capturing @ the default sampling rate of VHS tapes (2205Hz i believe? perhaps someone can confirm/correct me)

I assume you mean 22.05kHz, not 2005Hz.

Anyway, I don't think that's a good idea. The audio from a VHS player is analog, there should be no problem sampling at too high a frequency, but there will be a problem if the sample rate is too low. There may also be problems if you resample the audio later, so I suggest that sampling at 48kHz (if the eventual target is DVD) is the correct way to do it.

Perhaps the noise reduction filters in Goldwave could help clean up the sound: I suspect that its simply noisy, so the encoder is wasting a lot of bits encoding the noise, which reduces the sound quality overall.