Equipment upgrade

[haarisa]

Yo. Whats up? I am actually new here. I got a lot of info from this board. I actually wanted to upgrade my equipment for better sounding mixes and recordings for both live instruments and vocals. Right now, I have the following equipment:

Event ASP8 monitors[almost the same as 20/20s I guess]
Studio Project C1
MXL 990 & 991 mics
Studio Projects VTB-1 preamp
ESI Wave Terminal 192L soundcard
Oh yeah, I use the M-Audio Keystation Pro 88 as a controller. It has weighted keys.

I use FL Studio in conjunction with a lot of plugins[waves,various steinberg and edirol plugins]. I mainly do hip hop and rnb. I was wondering what would be my next step, or rather, what would be the thing that you would upgrade if you were in my shoes right now.

[Synkrotron]

difficult really...

what's your upgrade budget?

ever considered moving away from FL?

is there any aspect of your setup that you are not totally happy with?

[haarisa]

I got around $500.00. I want to acheive the best sound possible for recording. Someone told me to upgrade the soundcard to an EMU-1820, or even get a Protools M-Box 2 or even a M-Audio 1010/1010LT.

*Edit: Will the soundcard make a difference in how my mix sounds? It seems strange that from FL Studio to a wave file, I get an awsome VERRY professional sounding mix, but when I use wave files with separate instruments to mix in Acid, the mix sounds like crap when compared to the one in Acid[I use Acid to record because it supports upto 24 bit recordiing]

[Synkrotron]

$500 won't go far I'm afraid... perhaps a good soundcard and some cables... really depends on how you want to record. Do you record just one track at a time or do you want to multi-track?

[haarisa]

I don't need a mixer. I just need one input for my microphone/preamp, and maybe a line in for a di box or some sort of instrument with a line out

[bubbagump]

A really great mic can be had for $500... AT4033, AT4050, AT4040, SM7, RE20, MD421, 57s... a bunch more. In other gear.. an RNP or an RNC... Grace 101. Though I will say, the EMU 1820M (makes sure it is the M) does sound fantastic. The clock and convertors in those things are amazing for that price range. But, if you are happy with the 1010....

[riffy]

If I were in your shoes I would sell your current microphones and pick up a better vocal mic & a decent instrument mic. bubbagump pretty much mentioned them.... a good pop filter and a couple set of headphones. Or maybe a one of those new Mackie boards (1220?) with the firewire output & sell your current card. This would take care of the need for preamps for a while, have some additional inputs, clean up the interfacing with the pc and provide for alternate signal routing and monitoring solutions. Everyone needs at least one small mixer