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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?"
Get thee to an Audio forum, fool.
I'm not normally one to complain about "Ask Slashdot" questions, but this isn't the best community to turn to for a recording question. There are forums in which nearly every member has bought many different audio interfaces -- you want one of those, not Slashdot.
It's hard to make a recommendation without knowing at a granular level what you want to do. How many inputs? How many outputs? Is latency an issue? What about frequency/bitrate? Digital inputs? Analog? MADI? Lightpipe? Some light reading... On the ULTRA high end, you would go with Apogee- http://www.apogeedigital.com/ - these are some of the industry's best da/ad converters; and with something like a big ben+rosetta on firewire, you'd be in good hands. Another contender could be rme http://www.rme-audio.com/ Then there's motu's line of products - http://www.motu.com/ - I've personally owned several of their interfaces and can tell you right out of the gate they're great. Good bang for the buck... Then you've got m-audio http://www.m-audio.com/ edirol http://www.edirol.com/ presonus http://www.presonus.com/
http://www.bistolas.net
good luck...
I probably wouldn't go for an internal card. Better to have an external box in many ways. This one a friend of mine has and it's very good for the money.
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http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/AudiophileU
I've only used it on OSX but I think the drivers should be just as reliable on XP.
This one sounds even better but is more expensive and you'll need firewire.
http://www.motu.com/newsitems/traveler-press
I've got their 828mkII and this one uses the same DAC/DAC as that which sound really good.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
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).
Echo makes some good budget pro audio cards, 20 or 24 bit DACs, well designed, with propper sheilding. Pick one that meets your needs for input / output channels. Be sure to have a sound engineer hook things up, or at the very least learn how to avoid ground loops. If you don't have any PCI slots, theres good external boxes out there that plug in via Firewire. Also you can possibly find a good PCIe card.
I'm no expert at this, but hang out in certain audio/video boards and read professionals' opinions on this (and stayed at a Holiday Inn last night). The common advice is to get an external audio interface that hooks to your computer via USB 2.0 or Firewire. The reason for this is that the electronic environment inside the PC case is extremely noisy (RF interference) making it almost impossible to get really clean audio if the analog audio circuitry is in there. That's why any professional audio card you see is usually external. I have seen M-Audio and motu recommended too. Oh, and what someone said about noise-free environment (quiet room) and correct microphone are also very important.
By the way, I imagine you'll probably find a better selection (and prices) of these interfaces at your local Guitar Center or discount music superstore than at your regular computer parts store.
Good luck.
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.
The ESI Julia@ and Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 are very very nice cards.Quite popular in Malaysia as it is dirt cheap,or u could even go for a modified 0404 ,though i am not so sure on the price
If you need to record audio from microphones with XLR inputs I'd go with something like the M-Audio Delta 44 24bit/96. It has 4 ins and 4 outs that can be used for recording from a mixer using professional microphones. The quality A/D and D/A converters are pretty good, and keeps in sync well. I've gotten some good recordings out of the card.
If you require more ins and outs, I believe that you can stack multiple M-Audio cards.
Note: They provide drivers for Linux too.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The SB 16 is actually [still] one of the better consumer sound cards, however I think that this company would be better served by a LynxOne.
Video Production Support
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).
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.
note: Balanced and unbalanced I/O :)
I'd recommend M-Audio as well. In a break out box. All the professional solutions are external. If you can find a cheap one that is still external, it's probably at least better than most consumer cards.
You'll still have some latency problems because of your PC, but I'm not sure if that will be an issue with what you're using it for. Check M-Audio's recommended PCs/Macs if it's an issue.
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.
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:
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The best bang for the buck I've found (and used) is the Echo Mia Midi PCI card. It is a pain getting it to work on Linux, but it will work there and I assume it is much more easily configured under Windows or on a Mac.
AFAIK all the songs at the site www.mauiruhisongs.com were recorded using that card [disclaimer: religious content], so you can listen there to get an idea of the quality of the sound.
Two channels in and two out are not enough for some though.
I have to agree with the parent. This is most certainly not the place to be asking this kind of question. However, I'm willing to throw in my 1.5 cents, as a musician.
Now you said this is primarily a radio show, so I'm going to take a jump here and say you won't actually be playing much live music. If this is the case, then you don't have to splurge on the much higher end stuff for that "perfect" sound. In fact, your recording quality doesn't have to be the max you can handle either. I will recommend that you do yourself a favor and go get yourself a nice quality Condenser Microphone with a pop shield(those funny felt looking disks they suspend in front). This will help reduce the wind noise generated by certain sounds you will make(Such as P's and B's).
I have to say, from experience, that my absolute favorite recording card is the Mark Of The Unicorn 828 mkII, but it has a serious amount of inputs that you may not need. You may find the Traveler or the Ultralite more your cup of tea. Either way, nothing beats getting into your local audio shop and trying one out
One final question I have is what program are you using? If you are using anything but Pro Tools, such as Cubase, then the MOTU stuff should be good for you. However, if you DO plan to use Pro Tools: then you are kind of locked into M-Audio or Digidesign. Pro Tools will only work with Digidesign/M-Audio approved hardware. Namely their own.
Don't skimp on a good mixer, be it software or a physical one; make sure your mixer is up to par with what you are doing. If you prefer to work with more physical equipment rather than virtual, then I would also recommend getting a compressor for your voice. These things can do wonders for your sound and levels
Finally, above all else: Be careful WHERE YOU RECORD!. 90% of people overlook this one critical, CRITICAL variable. You could have this amazing live sound, your could be Howard Stern (or Opie and Anthony); and if your acoustical environment is terrible: your recording will suck. There are some excellent resources out there. You just have to google for it.