Soundcard with Mic Pre, best option?

technominds

technominds

New member
A friend of mine wants to take his recordings a little more seriously... so as of his next birthday i'l be building him a 2.5ghz quad core machine for him to start using for audio.

I want to get him a little something to get his signal chain working better.

At the moment he is using a terrible Behringer MIC100 "tube" preamp and he is using the default soundcard on the PC to record.

I was thinking of getting him an all-in-one soundcard/preamp and I stumbled across the Alesis I/O2 USB interface.

I'm hoping this will give him cleaner inputs/outputs as well as a better pre for his studio projects condenser until he can afford a decent pre.

Is there any product that beats it for the price range?
Any known problems with these soundcards?

I can pick one up for £80 which seems like a great deal!

- TM
 
I've never heard much good about the Alesis gear. At least not in terms of longevity.

I've been itching for an Echo Layla 3G myself. Which might be a bit more than you're wanting to invest. I have an M-Audio Mobile Pre which is alright. The Presonus Firepod seems to be the more common multichannel interface.

You don't really need a super fast computer for audio. Although that depends on how complex your audio projects are. But even on the complex side, you can simplify things in chunks to still get by with a relatively slow computer. Just make sure that there's lots of disk space and lots of RAM. Video on the other hand requires faster gear. Especially in the HD department. Given that some processes can never be multi-threaded to take advantage of 4 cpus, you might be better served with a faster dual core than an average quad. Either can do the job at these speeds. Although anything < 3GHz is a bit dated at this point IMO. At least the 3.1GHz dual core chip for my motherboard has been around since 2006. Which is an eternity by tech standards.
 
Something like the Presonus Firebox maybe...or things of that type:

http://www.presonus.com/products/Detail.aspx?ProductId=4

presonus_firebox.jpg
 
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