Sound card/quality issues

A

alba320

New member
I'm experiencing some issues with quality, it seems. Some of my mixes seem to lose their "body" so to speak after rendering or changing to mp3. I realize mp3's are lower quality, but there should still be a fairly good sounding mix, (as long as it was good to begin with). Here's my current setup:

Windows Vista 32 bit on a
Dell Dimension c 521 upgraded to 3 gigs of ram. External hard drive (1 TB)
AMD Athlon 64x2 dual core processor 3800+ 2 GHZ

Reaper is my main DAW. I also use Adobe Audition for Editing. Recording guitars or vocals, I plug (analog) into a Boss BR-532 digital 4 track (as a preamp) and line out directly into line in jack on PC, using the Boss as a "preamp". I have no additional soundcards, also I'm using ASIO driver. Do I need a new sound card? If so, which would you reccomend? I'm saving all mixes as .wav files, then converting as needed. Sampling is 44.1 khz. I obtained a degree in Audio Engineering/music production in '94, so I have a good handle on things, and I'm very modest about my craft. Am I missing something? Check some of my production samples :

EAE Music Productions | Facebook

and just take a listen. I would like more general feedback on the quality of the products that come from my home studio. Any suggestions would help alot! Thanks Guys!!!
 
I'd say you need a recording interface. Built in sound cards may record at a CD quality rate but their a/d conversion is horrible. I have a presonus firepod 10 and it sounds awesome when I record with it. Has good quality preamps and ad converters. Check out an m-audio fast track interface. It has a pretty modest price and is pretty flexible for guitars and vocals. But a good recording interface will definitely improve your quality.
 
Brenton said:
I'd say you need a recording interface. Built in sound cards may record at a CD quality rate but their a/d conversion is horrible. I have a presonus firepod 10 and it sounds awesome when I record with it. Has good quality preamps and ad converters. Check out an m-audio fast track interface. It has a pretty modest price and is pretty flexible for guitars and vocals. But a good recording interface will definitely improve your quality.
Click to expand...

Thanks!! This will certainly help. Will this cut down latency since all the conversion is done away from the pc??
 
It should reduce latency because you are using ASIO protocol. With my interface, I can set the latency as low as 2ms, completely unnoticeable by the human ear.
 
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