sound cards

M

Milkman

New member
Hi All,

I am looking for a good recording card. Currently, I am using a SB Live Platinum 5.1 with Live Drive. It is excellent for MIDI but it is still a 16/48 card. I use my Mackie 1202VLZ Mixer into it. A few questions:

How much difference will i notice between using my SB Live as oppose to a 24/96 card?

Can anyone recommend a decent 24/96 card (as cheap as possible)...all it really needs is a line in/out maybe a spdif too....no preamps as my Mackie has lovely ones.

Thanks,

Milkman
 
I went from an SBLive to a 24/96 card (an Echo Mia - $199). Was like going from a noisy hallway to a quiet studio booth.... big difference and well worth it. My noise floor went from -53db to -75db (that's a big difference).

Keep the SBLive and use it for Soundfonts, MIDI and CD-audio (none of the other higher-end cards will do these and your SBLive should work with them, mine did.)

If you get a good card you certainly won't regret spending the money.
 
thanks timmy. my snr ration right now is 96db...just wondering how much difference I will hear in the actually recording quality between 16/48 and 24/96. If I record at 24/96, won't everyone still hear it as though it was 16/48 due to the quality of cd's?

Thanks,

Milkman
 
24/96 is only as good as the actual Quality of the converters. if get down with downtown julie brown at 24/96 it won't mean much unless i was well rested the night before to say the least.
with low-end pro sound cards it's important to run them at 24/96 in order for them in the pro area. by pro i mean what you put into the thing is what you get out of it as effectively as possible.
so a mid pro setup may be able to record at 20 44.1 and due what we can only do at 24 96.

wrt to the eventually burning a cd. if an effect is applied, the calculations may include carries. for instance if all you do is 4+5, fine since that is 9 (still one digit). but if we go one step further,
5+5 ... boom now we have 10. if limited to one digit we'll have to either call it 0 or 1. someone may argue, 'well like we could be intelligent and round to 9 somehow' etc but then they really wouldn't need to be reading this anyway. the point is easy enough - when doing the calculations the actual data can 'grow'. when dithering down to cd quality it's not completely in vein since the calculations worked throughout the entire data.

i'll be doing a final thread on my experience with the 1010 etc.
imo at 24/96 it gives me exactly what i put into it. come to find out (thanks i believe to 'bluebearsound' or something like that) a mouse was eating into my perfect 24 96. there's a beautiful patch on the roland xp30 called 'full stops' (pr-a:046). with the ridiculous range it's like i get lost in space. and then... i hear something feeding far away in the nuances of this beautiful recording. come to find out, the usb controller (to which is connected an optical mouse of all things) is tied to the same irq as the 1010. needless to say i nuked the usb immediately. it is mind bending (effectively) that a mere glow in the dark mouse could make such wretched havoc!

happy recording,
jeff
 
Great. Thanks guys. One more question.

If audio is recorded at 24/96, and when burned to a cd it will only be 16/48, isn't some audio quality lost?

So, if burning to a cd, isn't a sound blaster 16/48 card good enough?
 
it's good enough until you can afford a 24/96 card without trouble.
most important thing is to keep the priorities straight and not waste time concerned about things not necessary later.

imo 24/96 is absolutely brutal to the computer. at the time i was integrating the athlon 1.2GHz TBird was showing great promise with the Digi001 testers but i wasn't comfortable with the motherboards at that time. aware of the p4 situation i went the piii 1GHz route. using the abit 133bx board made it possible to overclock the intel 440bx chipset to 133MHz. sprinkle in 512MB sdram, some raid, 3 40GB hard drives and the most i'm comfortable with as 'completely stable' is 24 stereo tracks at 24/96 with plenty of room for plug ins. i don't mean, 'ah it can record 24 stereo tracks at a song's length' but stable in rigorous circumstances. having read many posts, docs, etc i had the graphics acceleration disabled. with that i got 'perfection' 50% of the time. it wasn't until i contradicted what i'd read and maxed the graphics acceleration that everything worked smoothly. at this point of testing i'm starting to deem 48 tracks completely impossible.
among many other tweaks. so it's cool you're seriously questioning the difference. so get a card that is good at 16 but can do 24/96 and realize answers later. my 0.02, good luck,
jeff
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top