yet another "what soundcard should i buy" thread

[Serg]

Hello, recoding newbie here.

I'm just starting this out, but i'm a little bit confused about some things. For the moment i need to record electric guitar, acoustic guitar, vocals and probably bass guitar, but i'll leave that for later. For the electric guitar, i have a boss gt8 that has spdif output. So i need a sound card that has digital in. For acoustic and vocals i'm going to mic them, right now i have an sm58 mic, guess this will do for starting out. My first thought was to keep it simple, just pass the acoustic guitar trough the gt8 and record using spdif, and use a cheap preamp for the mic.

I was looking at the m-audio 192 but i've heard the drivers are not really mature on linux. This would be my os of choice, but i could use windows if this card is worth it. The 2496 i've heard it works great under linux, but i consider this to be a really old card, so i don't know if it would be a good choice, but it's really cheap. I also have a good deal for an used rme 9632, but this may be too much for what i need right now.

I know there is a real difference between sound cards, because of the A/D converters, but if i plan to record using the digital interface, does the card matter? Would there be a loss of quality if using cheaper cards for recording the spdif output? I may buy a good mic preamp that has digital out also.

I'm not really planning to start a studio, just some small recordings, but i don't want them to sound bad. I'll also be recording one instrument at a time, so I don't need a lot of inputs, and i think there is a huge difference between the m-audio 2496 and the rme 9632, but would the rme really be what i need?

Thank you and sorry for the long newbie post.

 

[TimOBrien]

If you need to get a linux compatible card, your choices are going to be very very small and I would HIGHLY reccomend that you contact the engineers at the company of any card you intend to buy to make sure that it will work with your distro of choice. With even fewer users than Mac, you're rolling a lot of dice that the drivers will work with your setup.

Other than that, Tweaks Guide is a good starter point:

http://www.tweakheadz.com/soundcards_for_the_home_studio.htm

 

[Serg]

Thank you for the link, i've found some useful reading there. Because of the limited number of channels i need, i'll simply go for the inexpensive m-audio 2496, record electric guitar using spdif, because my guitar processor already has a decent output, and i'll probably buy an external a/d converter and a preamp for the vocal mic in the future, i have to see what results i get with this card first. Yeah.. and after reading the articles i also got a cheap m-audio midi keyboard just for fun.

If i have some good results this way i may upgrade to multi channel and record electric guitar with several mics and a tube guitar amp, because i've heard that's the pro way to do it. Right now i hope the 2496 will do the job. Thanks.