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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?"
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.