now i know soundblasters are shunned upon, but:

[rane]

would a soundblaster audigy pro suffice for high quality condenser mics?

http://soundblaster.com/products/Audigy2ZS_platinum_pro/


those are hte specs.


i dont really know pound for pound (figuratively speaking) what everything means when reading the specs of audio cards in general, but id really like to know why soundblasters' top card (manufactured by creative, which is producing awesome recording soundcards under E-MU) cannot compete with say, an m-audiophile 2496?

 

[Jim Y]

The Audigy was developed for multimedia - music/games/dvd.... the lot. As such it's a jack-of-all-trades, master of a few with some "gotchas" along the way. The "pro" Audigy is expensive, but there are always people who want to pay more for a top model and Creative oblige!

What you need to do is decide what features you need and what software you want to work with.
For instance...
1: E-mu or Creative, you don't get multichannel MME drivers for software like CoolEditPro or Adobe Audition.
2: Creative ASIO only runs at 48 and 96 Khz.
3: E-mu and M-audio do not have midi synths on the card. This is a big plus with the Audigy for many musicians as its Soundfont synths are actually quite good.

You could consider having two cards - a more basic Audigy for game/surround sound and its midi synths and an Audio card like the E-mu or M-audio for recording and mixing. If you pick an E-mu card like the 0404, be sure to install this BEFORE the Audigy else you'll get a driver software error.
The Audiophile 2496 does currently have better all-round driver support.

For condensor mics, you really need a balanced (3wire) preamp with 48volt phantom power for the mic. Few entry level soundcards provide this. You would need a mixer to provide the pre-amp - even cheap Behringer ones have a better pre-amp than ones built in the soundcard could be anyway.