I'm just mixing and sampling. I won't be recording, for now at least. But honestly how can a pair of monitors sound good with an onboard soundcard.
Go check out Ethan Winners website, Realtraps for your answer. Its been tested exhuastively. Modern DA converters are more then adequate for pretty much everything. In blind listening tests, most people actually prefer jittery clocks which shouldn't be a problem. Now if you have a audio card with a shitty clock generator or improper clock generator. That will cuase tunning issues. Aside from that. Its alot of BS.
Where things get murky is analog buffering and signal handling. Most modern sound cards made since the year 2000 are more then adequate for any non professional and even professional use.
you might be surprised. Digital sound reproduction will never sound the same as analogue, but either way, crappy speakers make crappy sound. The point of monitors is not thier loudness...it's thier accuracy in reproducing the content sent to them.
Yeah I'd be real surprised. I have around 1000 hours of studio time under my belt and a bunch of it behind the mix desk.
But the sound being sent to the monitors has to be accurate too.
Your onborad sound card is more then likely just fine,just for giggles what is it ?
true enough. Onboard sound on today's motherboards is acutally pretty good...far better than it has been for many years.
However, of course an add-on card can be better...but it can also be worse, too. Again, it's all about choosing the right tools for the job.
Depends. Theres alot of marketing hoopla like "lifted the viel" which is utter bullshit. Look for blind listening test data and you see a very different picture.
Well, what would you suggest? My motherboard is mid-range, so I would think a dedicated card would be helpful.
Maudio cards are nice. you could also get a emu for %50 of the money and get the same card with the same preamps and AD and DA converters.
Your onboard sound card will be more then good enough to get you started. Unless its a really big pile of shit. Which is highly unlikely.
If I was gonna drop $200 on a card. It would be a M-audio Delta 1010lt. Great card, very flexiable and easy to use, but absoluely overkill for the bedroom musciain.
Just use the onboard sound and buy some good near field monitors, spend the rest of your money treating your room. It'll be vastly more critical to have a accurate listening enviroment without reflections and other nasty problems then it will be to have $5000 sound cards and $100000 monitors. Honestly, your enviroment is more of a problem then the accuracy of most products above $100.
