An Affordable Pro-Quality Sound Card?

TFGeditor asks: "The company I work for is launching a pre-recorded radio program. I will be working with other staff (all in remote locations) to create the sound clips and then cobbling the show together (mixing). I will also interface with the co-host at a remote studio over the net via uber-broadband connection, producing our portion of the show as if we were in the same studio interacting with each other. What is the best sound card for the money (PC/XP) for this type of application?"

Comments

Re:Your output is no better than the weakest link

[qortra]

Not necessarily. People keep pushing this viewpoint, but it isn't always true. Sure, if you're using a fisher price speaker with your computer, you might not be able to discrimiate between sound cards, but in general, a relay race is a more apt analogy for audio equipment than a chain. Each component can single-handedly degrade or improve the performance of the entire system regardless of the other components' performance.

To answer the original question, I think the M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 is one of the best consumer audio cards on the market (so long as you're not looking for a ton of I/O).

Avoid Creative Labs

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Their quality has gone up quite a bit in the past few years, but it's still not as nice as the MOTU, Echo, or M-Audio gear. Creative sells a great deal of gear to people who believe gimmickry like their claims of impossible S/N ratios, so you must understand that their efforts are really focused on attention-grabbing features (like 5.1 simulations from stereo in hardware) instead of quality (like rock-solid clock signals). Also, their drivers suck. Professionals DO NOT use Creative's products, and their attention to professional features like simple, solid drivers is lacking for that reason. Other manufacturers cater to the crowd that is more discriminating about these details and don't care about 3D audio accelleration in games, for example.

Finally, they recently had a serious issue where they advertised 24bit audio, but it was only 24bit on PLAYBACK. This may have been resolved, but I recently saw some posts on a forum that indicated that it wasn't. I have been doing semi-pro audio on PC's since the days of the Turtle Beach Tahiti in 1994 (back when TB made really wonderful gear... sigh) and I would never trust my music to a Creative Labs product. -NEVER-

A friend has the Mia and we're wrapping up an EP on it for our mastering setup. We recorded at my place where I use a Yamaha 01V digital mixer with an optical connection to a Terratec EWS/88D (older stuff, but I like it). The Mia is nice. I've heard great things about the recent M-Audio products as well. You should strongly consider an external box if you are doing recording (as opposed to mixing). Cards are still prone to noise (although it's much better these days than when PC audio first started) and breaking it out from the inside of the EM-washed case makes a big difference. Not to mention that if you get a firewire or USB device you can use it with your laptop and have a mobile recording solution (of course, you will then not be able to match the latency of a PCI card; this explains why I have a card but I use the card as a digital interface to an external A/D D/A converter, my mixer).

Re:I recommend the Soundblaster 16

[Uncle Snuffagus]

Soundblaster cards are great for games, movies, and listening to music. When the intented use is to record, however, they are a poor choice because the input convertors are not very good. There is also the issue that they are internally rate locked to 48k and will force SRC onto streams of any other rates (such as the CD standard of 44.1k). Good for games, but not so good for the project studio. A simple low-end pro card like an audiophile 24/96 is a much better choice for about $100 or so, if you can deal with only having line-level inputs. Do you need Mic inputs? Phantom power? How many input signals will you be dealing with at the same time? After you have the answers to these questions, you can compare products with the feature set you need from M-audio, RME, and Presonus to determine the exact card that is best for you. You can't go wrong with products from any of these three companies.

Soundcards

[clockwise_music]

• Stay the hell away from any internal cards. Noisy and a royal pain in the bum.
• A "breakout" box will make your life a lot easier. Try to get something that has at least 4 ins and 2 outs. Avoid those things that are an internal card but come with a jack with lots of female plugs. Ergh.
• Stay the hell away from anything by Creative.
• Try to get yourself a decent microphone. A nice condenser makes everything sound a lot better.
• Have you considered software? What are you going to use? What have you used previously?
• Myself, I have an MBox2 by digidesign. Doesn't seem like a long of bang for your buck, but it does come with ProTools. While this may be overkill for a radio show, if you want to seriously get into recording and mixing, it's really the industry standard. Works fine in XP. (Also consider Cubase).
• M-Audio hardware is meant to be ok. Check it out.
• Don't listen to those losers who tell you that you need a Mac. You'll be paying twice the price (no offense, I love OSX, but hardware is $$$) for the same thing.
• Getting a great soundcard + mic will make a big difference, even if you have crap speakers (or headphones). Especially if you're doing stuff for other people. Mixing will be difficult though.
• Get yourself a good pair of headphones. Annoying, but a lot cheaper than a good pair of speakers (+ amp).
• Go to a recording studio and ask if you can 'shut up and watch' for a while. Don't go a super-duper expensive studio, maybe just a place where they record demos. If the guy is nice enough you'll learn a lot.
• Keep it simple! The less stuff you have, less can go wrong!
• Mixers are cheap as hell these days. The behringer stuff is very cheap and good. If you're not recording multiple sound sources simultaneously, consider getting a good soundcard that only has 2 or 4 good AD converters and piping everything through your mixer.
• Don't skimp on patch leads and plugs and connectors.
• Sales people will bullshit you into buying expensive crap! Don't listen to them! Find someone who is genuially interested in helping you meet your needs!
• Good luck!

Re:I recommend the Soundblaster 16

[dgatwood]

This company would be better served by asking on an audio board. You should ask on ProSoundWeb if you're feeling lucky. Otherwise, homerecording.com has a BBS that a lot of recording folks frequent (myself included). Neither the SB 16 nor LynxOne will EVER be recommended on an audio board. You can't even get Mac OS X drivers for the LynxOne (according to the company's website). It's a fossil. And the SB 16 is a toy. Utterly a toy.

The first mistake the person asking the question made is to use the words "sound card" and "professional" (well, pro-quality) in the same sentence. These days, the correct term is "audio interface" because almost every modern interface these days is NOT a card. I would strongly recommend FireWire; USB is at best marginal, IMHO. Above all else, though, get something that is external. I say this for three reasons:

• Internal bus architectures cannot be easily adapted to new bus architectures. PCI is being phased out in favor of PCI Express which is not compatible with legacy parallel PCI cards, so with a PCI card, you'll be stuck with a large investment that you won't be able use after you replace your computer a couple of times.
• External audio interfaces are more immune to interference generated by electronics inside your computer. While it is possible to achieve this with PCI cards using a breakout box, it's less than ideal.
• FireWire audio interfaces can be used with laptops.

With a PCI interface, you're stuck on a Windows PC desktop forever (unless you want to try to run Ardour under Linux). You'll never be able to switch to a Mac because current Macs don't have legacy parallel PCI slots. You'll never be able to move to a laptop because the cost of a PCI breakout box is much, much more than it would cost to buy a FireWire interface . Finally, within about 5 years or slightly over, you'll be stuck trying to keep your current computer running because you'll be hard pressed to find a motherboard that still supports PCI.

I'm not going to give any specific recommendations within the FireWire space. I'll say that the Presonus pres are slightly better than the M-Audio pres, IMHO, and I've heard some people also mention that Presonus pres are better than the TASCAM pres. So if you're going for that very last tiny drop of quality, that's something to consider. Of course, if you're really trying to spend money, you can't go wrong with an RME Fireface or an Echo AudioFire. I'm also a fan of MOTU; of course, while a lot of Mac users swear by them, I've heard some PC users swear at them, so YMMV.