Laptops and soundcards

  • Thread starter Thread starter StressPig
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StressPig

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Hi

I'll be changing jobs soon so the PC I use at home will have to go back to my employer. The good news is that my new employer can let me have a laptop. I have a very simple music set-up on my PC at the moment, old Roland KR-55 keyboard and Cakewalk v6 (not exactly state of the art!). I've managed to download some of my music from my old Atari (yes, I'm that far behind the rest of the world) and am beginning to get them into some kind of recordable state.

My question is, can soundcards be fitted to laptops? I've never used one before (laptop) - are they designed to take soundcards with digital in/out ports? The laptop will be a lot more powerful than my current PC so that'll be good but I can't find any references to people using laptops for music, maybe I'm searching with the wong engine but it doesn't seem common. Is it just a cost thing that puts people off or will there be hardware/software problems?

If I sound confused/unsure, that's because I am...
 
There are a few ways of doing this. A number of companies make cardbus interfaces such as echo and RME. Also you can get a firewire interface such as the MOTU 828 or the Mobile I/O from Metric Halo. Some of these units have more internal processing than others and the prices vary greatly between companies. Magma makes a chassis adaptor that allows any regular PCI card to be interfaced with a laptop, however, it's around $900. Don't forget when using a laptop you get slower drive speeds and generally less RAM as well. I have a MOTU 828 right now with my lPC aptop and I'm just waiting for my firewire card to arrive so I can set it up.
-Jamie
 
Ok, thanks for that. Still trying to get my head round all this info. I've now read that USB limits you to 20-bit rather than 24-bit. Is this a big difference? If I want to end up with a recording on a CD, that's 24-bit, right? If I have to record at 20-bit can the human ear really tell the difference? I'd be recording guitar, bass, vocals.

Thanks for your help.
 
StressPig,

Audio CDs are 16-bit.

Re recording at higher resolutions and/or higher sampling rates, there's a ton of arguing all over this board and everywhere else about this issue that's gone on over the last couple of years. Ultimately if you are going to CD, you will have to change the bit size down to 16 bit and the sampling rate to 44.1 kHz.

The differences to my ears are very, very subtle, especially with stuff like guitars and drums and vocals, but then I'm an old fart whose ears are probably going...

So read all the arguments pro and con and decide for yourself.
 
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