Re: Sound Cards - an Inquiry [off topic]

[M3chakucha@aol.com]

Dear all,

        One majour problem with the Creative Labs cards are that they are 
inherently
"noisy" and tend to generate a massive amount of "white" noise into any 
sample
that you are working with...  Yes, if you are recording digitally, you are
still sampling.  I, too have been looking at different sound cards out 
there,
and I concur with this post, the mid-range prices for musicians tends to 
be in
the $400.00 to $800.00 price range, with about $1200.00 for the typical 
top-
notch card that is PCI (and usually IBM PC or Mac PC compliant, but not
necessarily NT compliant).

        A few people out of Digital Guitar Digest, and Midiguitar have 
suggested the
Yamaha cards, as they tend to be a little less expensive than those of 
other
manufacturers, usually at about $250.00 to $345.00 with all of the wave 
table
add-ons.  I may go that route in the beginning, but it just seems to make
better sense to stick with the AWE32Gold (with 28MB cache) that I currently
use, and enjoy, and then get the card set(s) that I really want...

        Big issues to look for in purchasing said card for me are:
        1.  Is it OS compliant?
        2.  Is it hardware compliant to your chipsets on your motherboard? 
 Is it
compliant to your Processor or Multiple Processors?
        3.  Is it hardware compliant to your other cards in your PC.
        4.  How much and what kind of resources will it chew up?  Same 
thing applies
to the drivers?  What type of drivers are required by the card?  
JavaScript,
*.dll's, Open GL, Active X, DOS, etc...
        5.  Lastly, how compatible is your existing recording software to 
card's
drivers and possible GUI's?  Some capture boards do some awfully strange
things when they are not used with their respective softwares (especially 
on a
video level).

        I know that this is not a good representation of either Stephen or 
Nick, but
it may help none-the less...  

        Haven't found much on the web, yet...  I've just been trying out
www.wmcworld.com and many talks with Brian Meader, www.metacrawler.com 
using
keywords of ' "audio capture", "sound card", "8 inputs", NT, 95, Linux,
digital, XLR, recording ' to some varying degrees of success...  I'll 
probably
try out a few other search words and see what more I can come up with...

        Anywho, hope this helps out some...

        Oh, the big thing to do before even starting off in this direction 
is to go
SCSI II UW in the very least for a more stable platform...  Going EIDE is a
real bad mistake, as you'll actually get lots of speed-ups, halts, and 
extra
clicks in the recording and play-backs...  Other issues are to look for
Audio/Video Hard Drives, and a good source for me has always been:
www.pricewatch.com  on these items.

        If you're looking to do this live, check out the Syquest Sparq or 
the Iomega
SCSI ZIP drive, I've found that they have really been happening for me, and
have not crapped out as often as a few HDD's in various computers, mostly 
Mac
Powerbooks, and the one 650 that just went thermal on me in the middle of a
gig...  Thank the beings of electricity for UNIX and cobbled computers!  
:)   

        Another thing to beware of is that if you are trying to press your 
own disks,
a WORM drive or even a rewritable is not the best way to go, as the sound
quality is definitely not there; output it an ADAT and then take it to a 
press
house...  It's worth the extra money to have it done correctly.

        Hope this helps out a bit, I'm off the soap box now...

        Lee Barnes