What's a soundcard good for?

[Guest pzeffan]

Can anyone tell me exactly what a sound card does for you? I don't have one because I've never felt I needed one. I've been under the impression that a soundcard is only needed to hook up your midi in's and out's when using a software sequencer such as cubase. What I really want to know is if it will improve the overall quality of my production sound and if it does then I was wondering what the best sounding card is.

[Guest soliptic]

Well you already have a soundcard, sort of, otherwise you wouldnt hear any sound. Its just that if u dont actually buy a proper one you just have onboard sound on your motherboard.

 

Basically.....

 

A decent soundcard will have ASIO drivers (or similar) which give you much lower latency (ie, delay between a note being triggered and the softsynth (or whatever) actually producing noise.)

 

It will support higher bitrate (24 bit) and sample rate (96khz) which have a huge range of advantages, which I wont go into... the topic has been covered widely already.

 

It will be full duplex, whereas onboard sound sometimes is not (ie, it will let you record and play back simultaneously).

 

It will have decent ADCs (analog-to-digital convertors) and DACs (digital-to-analog convertors), important for good quality when recording or listening respectively (you still have to hook your computer up to an amp/speakers/headphones, somehow, right).

 

Other than such basic advantages, certain soundcards may also offer other features - for example, the SW1000XG with a widerange of editable onboard sounds, the Creamware range with onboard DSP chips to provide quality synths and FX without placing any strain on your CPU, etc.

 

Basically there are a whole load of advantages...as for recommendations... again, this topic has been covered very extensively already, so I will simply be brief, and say that me and my housemate both have M-Audio cards, and they are very nice indeed.