nice(er) pre amps into computer sound card Bad idea?

[meowadishi]

Hello.

My audio interface seems to be dying. Fine. I am not in a situation where I need to record more than 2 inputs at once anyways. (Apartment living) SO I am going to plug my Art TPS into the sound card of my iMac. I know it works...I just have 2 questions.

1. Clocking. Will I need to be doing any kind of clocking between the computer and the pres? I am pretty sure no. But I would rather know for sure.

2. If I invested in higher end preamps would running them through the build in sound card kill any affect of having said nicer preamps?

Thanks.

 

[Chili]

There shouldn't be any kind of 'clocking' between the soundcard and mic pre if you're connecting with audio signals.

You might consider buying another/new interface and not rely on your soundcard to do the conversion. It's not made with quality components and jitter and timing errors might be noticeable. Also, I believe most sound cards only sample at 48khz and then soft convert after the fact to any other sample rate. So, if you set your DAW to 44.1khz, you might lose more data during an intermediate conversion step. Again, I'm not positive this is the case with newer computer sound cards, but it was with older ones.

Having said all that, Ethan Winer has posted sound clips comparing cheapo soundcards with high end converters and asking people to tell which is which. Not everyone gets it right. ymmv.