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Hi I know there's probably some archived stuff on this topic but I'm posting as a new question b/c I want to know what everybody's current thoughts are on this.. How important is the sound card to production? My PC is great but the sound setup in hardware lists as ATI High Definition Audio Device, and Realtek High Definition Audio, and that's it.... Anecdotally I think sometimes I get great sound, I produce through Ableton Live and Reason - but I'm wondering now because of some lukewarm reception to remix contest submissions and such, whether this is a bottleneck that I don't see....

What's everybody's opinion on this? I've been working on electronic production for a long time but no one's really ever breached the issue of the sound card and up until recently it hadnt occurred to me, maybe this is a thing.. Anyway I would love to know what you all think, thanks - ++^^

You will need a proper audio interface eventually. For better sound, lower latency, mobility, etc. I think audio interfaces are getting cheaper these days, well worth the investment.

Whether or not it is causing you a bottleneck you don't see, hmm. That depends. I'm pretty sure people have made dope music with the shittiest piece of equipment, so having a stock sound card's not gonna limit you.

Depends on how you work and what software you like to use. You're not going to be able to have 15 plugins open and 25 channels of audio running without an insane latency (the crackles/stuttering), and possibly not at all depending on computer specs. If you use any kind of MIDI controllers you will have a hell of a time with bad latency, especially with keys. You won't hear a sound until possibly several seconds after you press a key. An interface will fix this, even a cheap one. There are plenty of entry level interfaces for under 100, and some around 50 bucks if you don't mind refurbished or second hand. Check the Audiophile line and the EMU cards for quality budget interfaces. Of course the better the card the lower the latency...

If you think about it, its the first and last stage in a digital audio chain, so getting a decent one will be logical.

If you still use your inbuilt sound card in your PC, then its like putting a mini engine in a ferrari. (imo)

Depone wrote:If you think about it, its the first and last stage in a digital audio chain, so getting a decent one will be logical.

If you still use your inbuilt sound card in your PC, then its like putting a mini engine in a ferrari. (imo)

I would buy a better soundcard but I have no idea how to install one in a laptop :s so I just use the inbuilt one, never really noticed any problems but maybe it is holding me back :\

EDIT: I have an m-audio fast track that I use for recording guitar/mic stuff which is meant to be an audio interface too but it doesn't have an output that I can connect to both of my monitors. I think because I can't find an rca cable suitable. I also only have two usb ports on my laptop and don't really want to have to permanently sacrifice one..

I'm gonna go against the grain here. A good interface is important for:

- Reliability: minijack connectors suck balls. Really. Eventually yours will break
- Connectivity: good luck hooking up synths, external mixers, etc with an internal card
- Improved latency (but really not THAT much)
- Knobs and bells and whistles: volume control, etc

But the difference in sound quality is really, really the *last* thing you have to worry about. There is somewhat of a difference in noise floor, jitter etc, but your sound card will NOT be the reason you're not winning remix competitions.

In short, it's important to have a decent audio interface for the reasons above, but it's not really gonna improve your production quality. Saying it's like putting a Mini engine in a Ferrari is a bit misguided IMO.

EDIT: I guess what I'm trying to say is that unless you can work out WHY it's holding you back (eg. you wanna use an external synth, the latency with MIDI controllers is too high etc), you don't need one yet.

paravrais wrote: EDIT: I have an m-audio fast track that I use for recording guitar/mic stuff which is meant to be an audio interface too but it doesn't have an output that I can connect to both of my monitors. I think because I can't find an rca cable suitable. I also only have two usb ports on my laptop and don't really want to have to permanently sacrifice one..

What cables do your monitors use? RCAs are typical. Because the interface does have RCA outputs.

static_cast wrote:I'm gonna go against the grain here. A good interface is important for:

- Reliability: minijack connectors suck balls. Really. Eventually yours will break
- Connectivity: good luck hooking up synths, external mixers, etc with an internal card
- Improved latency (but really not THAT much)
- Knobs and bells and whistles: volume control, etc

But the difference in sound quality is really, really the *last* thing you have to worry about. There is somewhat of a difference in noise floor, jitter etc, but your sound card will NOT be the reason you're not winning remix competitions.

In short, it's important to have a decent audio interface for the reasons above, but it's not really gonna improve your production quality. Saying it's like putting a Mini engine in a Ferrari is a bit misguided IMO.

EDIT: I guess what I'm trying to say is that unless you can work out WHY it's holding you back (eg. you wanna use an external synth, the latency with MIDI controllers is too high etc), you don't need one yet.

yeah my mini/Ferrari thing was a bit ott. Im still drunk from last night

Disco Nutter wrote:

paravrais wrote: EDIT: I have an m-audio fast track that I use for recording guitar/mic stuff which is meant to be an audio interface too but it doesn't have an output that I can connect to both of my monitors. I think because I can't find an rca cable suitable. I also only have two usb ports on my laptop and don't really want to have to permanently sacrifice one..

What cables do your monitors use? RCAs are typical. Because the interface does have RCA outputs.

LOL, i just checked the same image on Google !

static_cast wrote:snip

pretty much exactly what he said. however, if you have a usb keyboard and way to send your monitors directly to the mini jack input of your computer, i don't see the problem in doing that either. macs come with good built in audio and not bad latency whatsoever. so yea it kinda depends on how good the computer is too.

paravrais wrote:

Depone wrote:If you think about it, its the first and last stage in a digital audio chain, so getting a decent one will be logical.

If you still use your inbuilt sound card in your PC, then its like putting a mini engine in a ferrari. (imo)

I would buy a better soundcard but I have no idea how to install one in a laptop :s so I just use the inbuilt one, never really noticed any problems but maybe it is holding me back :\

EDIT: I have an m-audio fast track that I use for recording guitar/mic stuff which is meant to be an audio interface too but it doesn't have an output that I can connect to both of my monitors. I think because I can't find an rca cable suitable. I also only have two usb ports on my laptop and don't really want to have to permanently sacrifice one..

I had a fast track pro too before and i just used i/4 rca jack with and adaptor i bought at the music store for like 3$ and with it at the other end you had red and white rca..didn't find that the little adaptor altered the sound or anything.
But,the preamps and converters are shit on the fast track,that's why I sold it..but it's way better than stock audio card

wormcode wrote:Depends on how you work and what software you like to use. You're not going to be able to have 15 plugins open and 25 channels of audio running without an insane latency (the crackles/stuttering), and possibly not at all depending on computer specs. If you use any kind of MIDI controllers you will have a hell of a time with bad latency, especially with keys. You won't hear a sound until possibly several seconds after you press a key. An interface will fix this, even a cheap one. There are plenty of entry level interfaces for under 100, and some around 50 bucks if you don't mind refurbished or second hand. Check the Audiophile line and the EMU cards for quality budget interfaces. Of course the better the card the lower the latency...

i dunno if im wrong here, and someone said macs come with a decent built in sound card, so maybe thats why i dont have these problems, but isnt the sound card just for the conversion of digital signals to analogue. so if you wanna record a real instrument with a mic, its not gonna sound the best getting a xlr to mini jack cable and recording it. maybe if you use those usb mics it might be alright as that converts to digital in the mic. also for mixing and shit you need a good sound card to hook up your monitors to, so you get an accurate sound coming out to reference. but why would the soundcard have any effect on how many plugins or channels you are using, this is just data, 1's and 0's right?

Tbh I don't think the stock sound card I got with my laptop is half bad and if anything performance is *lower* through the fast track but thats just played through my hi-fi. I can't hook it up to my monitors because no rca cable i've found is long enough to split and reach round my whole setup.

Never notice any latency or any lack of quality in the sound my computer puts out. It's a Dell studio xps so it's built with media type stuff in mind.

You're not going to be able to have 15 plugins open and 25 channels of audio running without an insane latency (the crackles/stuttering), and possibly not at all depending on computer specs. If you use any kind of MIDI controllers you will have a hell of a time with bad latency, especially with keys. You won't hear a sound until possibly several seconds after you press a key.

Never had any of these issues :

EDIT: Think it's an intel high definition audio something something inside my lappy, is that mena do the job as it were??

+1 on Static's post. Any decent soundcard's DACs are going to be fine for monitoring, I'd be more worried about your monitors and listening environment. Only buy a new one if you need more ins/outs or are wanting to record instruments or vocals.

Latency shouldn't really be that big of a problem with stock drivers vs a nice interface. Asio4All makes it pretty easy to get decent latency with any card. I remember using my shit laptop's built in card I had a bit of latency sometimes but that just because it was weak and I was pushing it hard. With a decently powerful computer you won't notice a difference.

I've got that Fast Track too, except the original silver version. It's a piece of turd but my headphone cable isn't that long so I use the interface as a cable extender and volume knob basically. I've always had shit sound recording through it but the other day I had my guitar plugged in and actually got a killer guitar tone with the help of Softube's amp room and compressors so there might be hope. As for output quality, I haven't A/B'd between it and the HD sound built into my motherboard but I doubt I'd be able to hear any difference on headphones.

skimpi wrote:

wormcode wrote:Depends on how you work and what software you like to use. You're not going to be able to have 15 plugins open and 25 channels of audio running without an insane latency (the crackles/stuttering), and possibly not at all depending on computer specs. If you use any kind of MIDI controllers you will have a hell of a time with bad latency, especially with keys. You won't hear a sound until possibly several seconds after you press a key. An interface will fix this, even a cheap one. There are plenty of entry level interfaces for under 100, and some around 50 bucks if you don't mind refurbished or second hand. Check the Audiophile line and the EMU cards for quality budget interfaces. Of course the better the card the lower the latency...

i dunno if im wrong here, and someone said macs come with a decent built in sound card, so maybe thats why i dont have these problems, but isnt the sound card just for the conversion of digital signals to analogue. so if you wanna record a real instrument with a mic, its not gonna sound the best getting a xlr to mini jack cable and recording it. maybe if you use those usb mics it might be alright as that converts to digital in the mic. also for mixing and shit you need a good sound card to hook up your monitors to, so you get an accurate sound coming out to reference. but why would the soundcard have any effect on how many plugins or channels you are using, this is just data, 1's and 0's right?

The audio has to go through the sound card and be processed before it comes out of the speakers, so the worse the sound card the harder of a time it will have. This has some good info on it: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan05/a ... sician.htm

As for Macs, I dunno what sound cards most come with but I was really talking about default onboard sound that come on most PC motherboards. When I was using onboard sound in between replacing my interface, in full projects latency had to be pushed up to around 30ms or more, and there was a lot of buffer overflows. Once I finally replaced my dead interface I was able to lower the latency to just around 8ms in the same projects with no overflows.

There are also bonuses with good interfaces such as DSP processing and DSP effects which take stress off your CPU, and when you get up to spending big bucks on things like UAD there is really countless advantages. The DSP advantages of lower end interfaces can definitely be argued against with todays processors with up to 8 cores, but I've not used anything over quad cores and always with an audio interface so I'm not sure of the differences. I wouldn't want to not have an interface though even with an 8 core as I need the reliable inputs/outputs they offer because I still work a lot with hardware.

Just to reiterate, your soundcard is NOT the reason you're not getting a good response.
I would look to other areas (IE your composition!) if you think there's a problem.

wormcode wrote:Depends on how you work and what software you like to use. You're not going to be able to have 15 plugins open and 25 channels of audio running without an insane latency (the crackles/stuttering)

i always thought these crackles and whatnot were due to the fact my computer was an old piece of junk that couldnt handle the processing (because of the weak processor, or the lack of RAM, dont really know as i'm not too computer-savvy), would an audio interface solve the problem or should i just stop being such a cheap ass and upgrade my 10y old PC ?

Increase your audio buffer as far as it'll go, then start pulling it back if things are doing okay. If it's still crackling at the highest setting you're probably best off getting a new computer. Also you can freeze/bounce tracks to try to save on processing power until you've got the cash for a new rig.

SunkLo wrote:Increase your audio buffer as far as it'll go

sir, you just gave my shitty pc another 10 years of life expectancy, thx for the advice