Does it make a big difference?

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Mikeman

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To anyone willing to address this:

My current soundcard is located on the motherboard, so when i started recording a couple of months ago, of course, i wanted to use that just to get started.

I started out recording some "rough cuts" of 25 tunes that I recorded on a tape machine, just me and the guitar. Well the engineer in me has kicked in, and each song has been a real challenge to get "perfect"....

Money is currently low, so someone who has gone through this change, how much is the quality is sacrificed by my cheapie soundcard (which isn't even a card!)

Thanks,

Mike
 
Well... usually the D/A converters are really cheap-o. Boils down to a farily thin sound that quickly starts to sound worse if you do too much processing.

By way of comparison, it's still a sizeable notch better than an average 4-track cassette recorder, but a very sizeable notch lower than a 24 bit pro recording card.

Here's something I did way way back when with the cheap-o on-board soundcard and Cubasis (the $79 teaser to Cubase).



Forgive the mix (...it was one of my first), but hopefully it should give you a rough idea of what kind of quality to expect.
 
I would suggest to you...........

Work with what you have, until you can save up enough money to purchase a better soundcard.

You will also need to pick-up a few other necessities...... ;)

When your cash is right. :D

peace...
 
Thanks!

The POD 2.0 and the Delta 44 are the next two items on my list!
I'm using my old Rockman X100 right now, and the noise is terrible!

Delta 44 seems to be the right price range and quality from what other posts are saying.
 
You know what the difference is?

You try real hard to make a good sounding recording with your cheapo soundcard....you do all sorts of things and spend a great deal of time mixing and EQ'ing and yada yada.... and in the end, it still has that cheapo quality to it....usually worse than your average low budget recording from a studio. You start thinking, "crap, maybe I just don't have what it takes to make a decent recording."

Then you upgrade to even a modest prosumer-grade soundcard and some decent monitors and suddenly recording becomes so much easier. Your mixing efforts are suddenly 100X more effective. You find yourself wondering why the hell you always used so much compression and reverb. You start concentrating more on finding good sounds via dials and mic placement because suddenly you can hear the difference. You start hearing the rest of your equipment and its shortcomings. You start hearing your room. It's like...thorny clarity.

But here's the catch...you'll get used to that next soundcard too...but you'd never want to trade back.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Sounds like you've been down that road before, Slackmaster.

The Delta 44 is sounding better all the time.
 
Mikeman said:
Sounds like you've been down that road before, Slackmaster.
Click to expand...

We all have. That's why it funny when newbies argue with us about stuff we tried 10yrs ago and realized it wouldn't work.
 
The soundcard does make a big difference, but it's hard to describe: you kinda have to hear it.
---If you know you'll be poor for quite a while, shop around for a Soundblaster Live 5.1. It'll do all the basic stuff, sound lots better than what you have now, and OEM/whitebox is only ~$32 + shipping online. The one possible problem is if it doesn't have the retail install CD included: the retail CD includes a device manager program you'll want to have. Last I saw, Creative had stopped posting the entire contents of their install CD's online, and now only offers the basic device drivers for download. So if the OEM doesn't have the full CD, you need to find somebody who can spin you a copy (illegal though it may be).
---The SBLive is a good soundcard for $32. For $80 retail price?--uhhh....I don't know. -In my opinion the newer Audigy cards aren't much to speak of either, for the prices charged.
---Some better PC speakers can help lots also. If you're still using a little pair, look into some $50 powered triplets (2 sattellites+sub). They're not studio-quality, but they're not studio-quality-priced, either.
 
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