MichaelM
New member
HELP!!! I want to buy a soundcard!
OK, more and more these forums topics come up with people stating something like this:
“OK, I want to start recording with my computer. I have x computer, x microphones, and want to record x. Some guy told me I need a soundcard. Is this true? Doesn’t my computer already have one? Any help?”
Anyway I don’t know why buy I feel like being helpful, which is why I’m writing this. I’m not recommending ANY card/interface here. There are so many companies around making gear, there’s no way I could recommend anything specific. Instead I am trying to explain the reasons and technology behind these sound cards so that people (newbies) can research cards that might suit them, and then ask for specific help. I’ve also tried to write this so anyone can understand it, not just uber 1337 haXXorZ. Well, the best that an IT student can do anyway . I’ve included links to wikipedia for some of the computer terms.
Doesn’t my computer already have a sound card?
YES! Well, probably. Pretty much every computer made in the last ten years has had one. If you have speakers plugged in to your computer and can hear sound, listen to music etc, your computer certainly does have a soundcard.
Great, so can’t I just use that?
Well, yes you can. Most built in sound cards have three holes, speaker out, line in and microphone in. If you have a mixer or any other line level source, you can plug it into the line in hole and use your computer’s built in sound card to record.
So what was that guy talking about? You just said I don’t need a new one!
Well, I said you CAN record with the built in card, but there are a lot of reasons you might not want to. These cards are built for the average consumer who doesn’t really do much more than listen to mp3s in Winamp. They aren’t suited to recording, and here’s why:
Low sample rate/bit depth
These cards work at 16 bit, 44.1 KHz. This just happens to be the standard for CDs, so it’s not that bad. This may be fine for you, but most real recording work is done at 24bit, and often at higher sample rate.
Latency
These cards usually have very high latency. Latency is like golf, you want a low score! Think of it as the time between you pressing the play button on screen, and the sound actually coming through the speakers. This becomes an issue when you are recording overdubs, and even worse when you are playing an instrument and monitoring through the computer.
Noise, and general crappyness!
There’s a lot going on inside modern computers, often the CPU, motherboard, graphics card, power supply each have a fan attached, not to mention case fans. These can introduce noise into the recording system. That’s why you see a lot of these ‘recording cards’ with boxes that sit outside the computer. Also (general crappyness part), these consumer cards lack quality AD/DA converters, which can make your recordings sound, well, less nice. The converters change analogue sound to a digital representation, and vice versa. The consumer cards like the one in your computer aren’t designed for recording, so the quality of these circuits can and does affect the quality of the sound. Read any of the digital vs. analogue arguments and you’ll see what I mean.
OK, you’ve convinced me, now which one should I buy?
Ah, that question. Well, which car should you buy? The answer: what one best serves your needs and budget. It’s the same with soundcards. There are a number of factors you will need to consider when buying a recording sound card.
Number of inputs
How many discreet signals you can send to the computer at once. A regular sound card has two, the left and right channels of the line in. There are recording cards that do just this, and there are cards that have a huge number of inputs. Basically what it comes down to is how many things do you want to record at once? A solo guitarist might only want to record his guitar by mic’ing up his guitar amp, and do an overdub for vocals. In this case a 2 channel card would do fine. I play drums. With my kit, with a mic on each drum, 2 for overheads, and another for the hihat, I use 8 microphones. Now I could either mix these first and send a stereo signal into the guitarist’s above 2 channel card, or I could get more channels, and send each mic signal into its own channel, and mix later. This would give me much more freedom at mixdown, which is why I have an 8 input sound card.
Number of outputs
This mostly depends on how you mix. When recording on the computer, you can mix completely in the box, or send the recorded audio out to a ‘real’ mixer for mixing. If you are comfortable with mixing in the box, then you only need a stereo card, to send the mixed output to monitors and/or a recorder. If you want to send each instrument’s track outboard for mixing, you’ll need enough outputs for each instrument.
Interface
The big one. What we’re talking about here is how you connect your sound card to the computer. There are three options here: PCI card, firewire, or USB. Each have their own advantages and disadvantages, but here’s the basic rundown.
PCI Card
This is a card that plugs straight into your computer’s motherboard via the PCI bus. To install one of these you need to open up your box, which may sound daunting but it’s not really. Because of this you CAN NOT use a PCI card with a laptop or any other computer that doesn’t support PCI (eg Mac Mini). PCI is the fastest interface, so you may get lower latency with it. It’s also older technology that has had most of the bugs ironed out. Once a PCI card is installed and working, generally it will work. It’s worth mentioning though that PCI has been superseded by PCI-Express. The two are not directly compatible with each other. Most new motherboards are coming out with both PCI and PCI-E busses, but eventually PCI will be no more. This isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but it will happen. I personally can’t wait for companies to take advantage of the new PCI-E technology and put out some new super recording cards.
Firewire
This is a good option for laptops or if you need portability, but also works fine in desktop PCs. To use this you need to have a firewire port on your computer, and if you don’t have one you can get a PCI firewire card. This has high bandwidth, and works well in many applications.
USB
Similar to firewire, but slower. Also there are two standards, USB 1.1 and USB 2.0. Version 2 is MUCH faster than 1.1, so it is much better suited to recording applications. Also keep in mind that to take advantage of USB 2.0 your computer needs to support it.
Bells and Whistles
Some cards simply offer line level inputs. Others provide microphone preamps, sometimes with phantom power. The guitarist described above would not need a mixer at all if he bought a sound card that included mic preamps.
Some interfaces are more than just a sound card as well. Some look like a ‘real’ mixer, with sliders and knobs and buttons. These are actually called control surfaces. It allows you to mix ‘in the box’, but instead of just using the mouse you can use the sliders and knobs to do the mixing, which is much more intuitive than trying to turn an on screen knob using a mouse.
Remember that just because you got a great recording card with heaps of features, doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to use it to its potential. The more inputs, outputs, and higher bit depth and sampling rate increases the load that needs to be handled by your computer. Make sure your computer is up to scratch BEFORE you invest into a recording sound card.
Hopefully that gives you a bit of information to get you started. I hope I haven’t confused anyone, if you don’t know what something means, Google it, use the search feature of these forums, or ask!
Michael Marner
But wait, you didn’t tell me what card to buy!
Wow you noticed. I didn’t want to, remember! Have a read of this, decide exactly what you want to do with your recording, have a look around to find what suits your needs and is within your budget, then ask the big questions. Oh, ok. Here are some links to popular manufacturers:
http://www.digidesign.com
http://www.echoaudio.com
http://www.edirol.com/
http://www.emu.com/
http://www.m-audio.com/
http://www.motu.com/
http://www.staudio.com/
http://www.tascam.com
Umm, if I've got anything really wrong here please tell me and I'll edit my post.
OK, more and more these forums topics come up with people stating something like this:
“OK, I want to start recording with my computer. I have x computer, x microphones, and want to record x. Some guy told me I need a soundcard. Is this true? Doesn’t my computer already have one? Any help?”
Anyway I don’t know why buy I feel like being helpful, which is why I’m writing this. I’m not recommending ANY card/interface here. There are so many companies around making gear, there’s no way I could recommend anything specific. Instead I am trying to explain the reasons and technology behind these sound cards so that people (newbies) can research cards that might suit them, and then ask for specific help. I’ve also tried to write this so anyone can understand it, not just uber 1337 haXXorZ. Well, the best that an IT student can do anyway . I’ve included links to wikipedia for some of the computer terms.
Doesn’t my computer already have a sound card?
YES! Well, probably. Pretty much every computer made in the last ten years has had one. If you have speakers plugged in to your computer and can hear sound, listen to music etc, your computer certainly does have a soundcard.
Great, so can’t I just use that?
Well, yes you can. Most built in sound cards have three holes, speaker out, line in and microphone in. If you have a mixer or any other line level source, you can plug it into the line in hole and use your computer’s built in sound card to record.
So what was that guy talking about? You just said I don’t need a new one!
Well, I said you CAN record with the built in card, but there are a lot of reasons you might not want to. These cards are built for the average consumer who doesn’t really do much more than listen to mp3s in Winamp. They aren’t suited to recording, and here’s why:
Low sample rate/bit depth
These cards work at 16 bit, 44.1 KHz. This just happens to be the standard for CDs, so it’s not that bad. This may be fine for you, but most real recording work is done at 24bit, and often at higher sample rate.
Latency
These cards usually have very high latency. Latency is like golf, you want a low score! Think of it as the time between you pressing the play button on screen, and the sound actually coming through the speakers. This becomes an issue when you are recording overdubs, and even worse when you are playing an instrument and monitoring through the computer.
Noise, and general crappyness!
There’s a lot going on inside modern computers, often the CPU, motherboard, graphics card, power supply each have a fan attached, not to mention case fans. These can introduce noise into the recording system. That’s why you see a lot of these ‘recording cards’ with boxes that sit outside the computer. Also (general crappyness part), these consumer cards lack quality AD/DA converters, which can make your recordings sound, well, less nice. The converters change analogue sound to a digital representation, and vice versa. The consumer cards like the one in your computer aren’t designed for recording, so the quality of these circuits can and does affect the quality of the sound. Read any of the digital vs. analogue arguments and you’ll see what I mean.
OK, you’ve convinced me, now which one should I buy?
Ah, that question. Well, which car should you buy? The answer: what one best serves your needs and budget. It’s the same with soundcards. There are a number of factors you will need to consider when buying a recording sound card.
Number of inputs
How many discreet signals you can send to the computer at once. A regular sound card has two, the left and right channels of the line in. There are recording cards that do just this, and there are cards that have a huge number of inputs. Basically what it comes down to is how many things do you want to record at once? A solo guitarist might only want to record his guitar by mic’ing up his guitar amp, and do an overdub for vocals. In this case a 2 channel card would do fine. I play drums. With my kit, with a mic on each drum, 2 for overheads, and another for the hihat, I use 8 microphones. Now I could either mix these first and send a stereo signal into the guitarist’s above 2 channel card, or I could get more channels, and send each mic signal into its own channel, and mix later. This would give me much more freedom at mixdown, which is why I have an 8 input sound card.
Number of outputs
This mostly depends on how you mix. When recording on the computer, you can mix completely in the box, or send the recorded audio out to a ‘real’ mixer for mixing. If you are comfortable with mixing in the box, then you only need a stereo card, to send the mixed output to monitors and/or a recorder. If you want to send each instrument’s track outboard for mixing, you’ll need enough outputs for each instrument.
Interface
The big one. What we’re talking about here is how you connect your sound card to the computer. There are three options here: PCI card, firewire, or USB. Each have their own advantages and disadvantages, but here’s the basic rundown.
PCI Card
This is a card that plugs straight into your computer’s motherboard via the PCI bus. To install one of these you need to open up your box, which may sound daunting but it’s not really. Because of this you CAN NOT use a PCI card with a laptop or any other computer that doesn’t support PCI (eg Mac Mini). PCI is the fastest interface, so you may get lower latency with it. It’s also older technology that has had most of the bugs ironed out. Once a PCI card is installed and working, generally it will work. It’s worth mentioning though that PCI has been superseded by PCI-Express. The two are not directly compatible with each other. Most new motherboards are coming out with both PCI and PCI-E busses, but eventually PCI will be no more. This isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but it will happen. I personally can’t wait for companies to take advantage of the new PCI-E technology and put out some new super recording cards.
Firewire
This is a good option for laptops or if you need portability, but also works fine in desktop PCs. To use this you need to have a firewire port on your computer, and if you don’t have one you can get a PCI firewire card. This has high bandwidth, and works well in many applications.
USB
Similar to firewire, but slower. Also there are two standards, USB 1.1 and USB 2.0. Version 2 is MUCH faster than 1.1, so it is much better suited to recording applications. Also keep in mind that to take advantage of USB 2.0 your computer needs to support it.
Bells and Whistles
Some cards simply offer line level inputs. Others provide microphone preamps, sometimes with phantom power. The guitarist described above would not need a mixer at all if he bought a sound card that included mic preamps.
Some interfaces are more than just a sound card as well. Some look like a ‘real’ mixer, with sliders and knobs and buttons. These are actually called control surfaces. It allows you to mix ‘in the box’, but instead of just using the mouse you can use the sliders and knobs to do the mixing, which is much more intuitive than trying to turn an on screen knob using a mouse.
Remember that just because you got a great recording card with heaps of features, doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to use it to its potential. The more inputs, outputs, and higher bit depth and sampling rate increases the load that needs to be handled by your computer. Make sure your computer is up to scratch BEFORE you invest into a recording sound card.
Hopefully that gives you a bit of information to get you started. I hope I haven’t confused anyone, if you don’t know what something means, Google it, use the search feature of these forums, or ask!
Michael Marner
But wait, you didn’t tell me what card to buy!
Wow you noticed. I didn’t want to, remember! Have a read of this, decide exactly what you want to do with your recording, have a look around to find what suits your needs and is within your budget, then ask the big questions. Oh, ok. Here are some links to popular manufacturers:
http://www.digidesign.com
http://www.echoaudio.com
http://www.edirol.com/
http://www.emu.com/
http://www.m-audio.com/
http://www.motu.com/
http://www.staudio.com/
http://www.tascam.com
Umm, if I've got anything really wrong here please tell me and I'll edit my post.
Last edited: