I bought a Stereo 3.5mm Jack Lead today - partly because I wanted to compete in that Rytmik competition, and partly because I wanted to get some DS music onto my iTunes playlist.

However, on playing back the recording, there is a noticeable hiss. My first response would be to turn the volume (DS and Recording) up, but when I do, the playback is extremely bass heavy.

Is it possible to record sound in "High definition" (or without hiss) with the DS and such equipment or am I wasting my time?

It was a cheap(ish) lead - about £5, and I am hearing about these gold plated leads, and would be willing to pay a reasonable price to get good quality sound from my DSi to my Computer.

Finally (and maybe off topic), what is that tiny socket beside the headphone socket on the DSi - is it another, higher quality option?

Thank You

I wouldn't worry about the gold plate, it won't do anything noticeable. It's like high definition cables, there is no difference between the $100 and $30 ones. There will be no difference unless one is defective.

The socket beside the headphone jack is for the headset for those very few games that actually use voice chat during online play.

I've found a temporary workaround.

I use Audacity as my sound recorder/manager, which has a tool for noise removal. (It was one of the first things I tried, but I couldn't get the noise sample to proceed with the effect. I recorded the hissy music , and then the DSi output at its lowest volume, and was able to remove the hiss.

It's still a bit quiet, and sometimes the process doesn't remove all of the hiss, or it might remove too much of the audio, so i'm still open to suggestions.

Should the 3.5mm jack be able to transfer audio at full volume, because when I plug my headphones in, the sound isn't heavy bass. I'm thinking that a higher quality lead would be able to transfer audio at a higher volume.

Thanks for the feedback.

Hi, you should be fine with an ordinary lead. There is no reason to buy some expensive cables. Some hiss is common in DSi audio output. Other thing that affect recorded signal is the audio interface on the other side of your lead. Sometimes integrated soundcards may be a bit noisy. But it is hard to say what is wrong, until we hear some sample of the music and of the noise. If you want, try to send me some samples to my email - lindam at cinemax.cz and I will check it if it is common noise level or not.

Well and the reason for bass heavy reproduction of recorded audio could be this: if you plug your headphones directly into DSi you hear directly its signal. When you record it and listen to it, your headphones are plugged into our PC audio interface - and settings of this interface affect what you hear. So if there is some heavy bass setting on your audio interface, you get bass heavy reproduction. And some interfaces could do this by default. Try to check sw mixer settings of your audio interface.

I took someone elses advice (I didn't really know what they meant initially) by opening my sound window, finding the "microphone", clicking properties and then levels and altering the "Microphone Boost" - namely, I dropped it from 20 Decibels to 0.

Now, while i still experience feedback on the highest volume, when the volume is set to a lower level, the hiss is much less apparent - in fact, I can hardly hear it. If that was what you were getting at when you said "Try to check sw mixer settings of your audio interface.", then thank you - you made it much clearer to me.

As it happens, I was a bit naughty and dropped an extra £3 on some gold plated cables, because I was at a loss as to what to do, and while the output was slightly better, this solution (the more subtle one) definitely gave me results.

Thank you.