Recommend a suitable sound card

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mike722

New member
Hello,

I will soon be wanting to set up a small home studio and want to know what sound card would suit my needs. I was hoping to spend about $100 on the sound card.

I will be mainly recording analogue signals to a PC (guitars, vocals) using cubase sx software. i once used cubase b4 but had terrible problems with latency which was down to my poor soundcard (i think)

My current PC setup is
XP SP1
XP 1800 Athlon
512mb RAM
80GB 7200RPM HDD.

Any suggestions on a suitable soundcard?

thanks

Mike
 
Increase your budget. Sorry, but there it is. The Audiophile 2496 is the floor for decent sound cards at approx. $150.
 
Thanks, have looked up the reviews on the net and it sounds great. i would stretch to $150. Are there any other sound cards anyone can suggest, the Audiophile 2496 seems quite difficult to find these days.
 
Yeah your right, thanks. Quite surprised how expensive these types of devices can be. I guess they are specialised equipment for the recording industry. (not just an SB 16 card for home users!) :)

cheers

Mike
 
You're right. Just look at the ones in your price range and read the features and think of what you need now. There's more good stuff on the market now than there has ever been.

H2H

-soundblasters are for video games:)
 
The Echo MiaMIDI is an alternative to the Audiophile. It has 1/4" balanced I/O instead of RCA.

If you're going to move into the 24bit audio world. I suggest you look into another HD. 80Gb won't cut it.
 
I am new to digital recording so please correct me if I am wrong as I am probably talking out of my arse here:

Surprised that you said an 80GB HDD isnt big enough. how much space would a 5 min song with say 10 analogue tracks take up? I thought that it used .wav files to hold the data which would only result in about 500mb using 10 tracks each 5 mins long? Also, as I am using only analogue sources I can only use 16 bit, is that correct?
I do alot of video editing on the 80GB HDD without problems which I thought would generate alot much data than audio recording. Any input appreciated.

cheers

Mike
 
If you're recording at 24 bit, 96KHz, that's
24 x 96000 = 2 304 000 bits per sec
= 288 000 bytes per sec

So for 10 tracks thats 2 880 000 bytes per sec.

A 5 minute song would use 2880000 x 300
= 172 800 000 bytes

I think that's right. You're 80GB drive should last a while.

You can record analog at 16 or 24, depending on the capability of your soundcard and the drivers used by your recording program
 
Math is fine, but I just looked at a song I have been playing with that was recorded only at 24/44.1, it's 15 tracks and only 2:42 long and I have over 330 MB in that folder. May not be math, but it's what it is.

H2H
 
Yeah there'll be other stuff in there like events, envelopes, undo history etc. that take up space
 
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