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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?"
I should add: your question is very vague. Will you be recording audio yourself? If so, you'll be wanting a decent microphone and preamp, as well as a quiet recording environment, more than a special sound card (assuming you've got something better than a Soundblaster), although the sound card is good to have. If you're not recording, just get some decent monitors and call it a day.
Internal sound cards have gotten pretty darn good, but you can still wind up with RF noise leaking into the audio. Keeping the ADC/DAC outside of the computer eliminates the possibility.
Now, the only audio input work I've done was digitizing vinyl, which isn't all that taxing. However, I'm fairly particular about sound quality.
What I've determined is that even good quality on board D/A equipment is poor. Much better, for a number of reasons, to use an external converter plugged in to an spdif jack (input and output).
I'm very happy with my EMU 1820, though for what you plan to do it may be overkill- I doubt you have much of a need for 8 channels of analog input + 10 digital channels, not to mention the other 14 host sources you can mix in(total of 32 channels hardware mixing). But the EMU cards also offer hardware accelerated effects... some of which, especially compression, can be quite important for broadcasting. Taking the load off your CPU can make a big difference sometimes.
Look for high quality DACs. Don't worry too much about 24 bit bit depth, or 96/192khz sample rates... 44.1/16 implemented well will be overkill as it is for any sort of radio broadcast or webcast. If you do want to go further, bit depth will generally mean more than sample rates, at least in my experience recording stuff- but there is little need unless you want to master for an analog medium and get aural advantages over compact discs.
The one problem with EMU cards is the tendency for the driver to go mental and corrupt itself. On the upside, this has only happened to me on boot- you really don't need to worry aobut it dying in the middle of a session. On the other hand it sometimes requires registry surgery and manual deletion of files in c:\windows\system32\ to let you reinstall the drivers. This doesn't happen often, but it's certainly a pain in the ass when it does.
For the capabilities they offer, the EMU cards are priced quite low. But as explained above, driver stability can sometimes be a significant issue. If you need 24/7 immediate availability, don't get them. But given that the worst case is probably that you lose an hour a day every 4-6 months(probably less), they can be quite good for many contexts.