14 Oct
2004
14 Oct
'04
8:18 p.m.
I was looking also for a sound card for audio, well supported in Linux
(specially under Demudi),
so I really apreciated your comments.
However I've got some more questions which I state below:
Emiliano Grilli wrote:
giovedì, 14 ottobre 2004 alle 12:47:25, Alejandro Lopez
ha scritto:
I must say first that I'm an ignorant about technical sound issues (but
I have some knowledge about electronics and spectral analysis so I
should be able to learn it some day...). This explains the nonesenses
and atrocities that I may have written below....
For my case, I guess that I should try Delta 44 as I don't use digital I/O.
Now I'm ""working"" with a Creative Audigy card and I want to buy
a new
one basically because Audigy doesn't allow realtime monitoring through
jack (the latency is at least 45ms and for me is too much) and because I
want to have a good dynamic response to record my acoustic guitar (now
it saturates the input or I must record at a low volume with a lot of
noise).
This could be a good option for what I'm searching for? Should I buy any
other external hardware to record acoustic guitar without saturating the
input? I'm always affraid of external mixers or amplifiers as they are
very expensive and add noise to my signal. Anyone can help me destroy
this myth?
[for the electric guitar I currently use an expression pedal which
outputs "line level" -> it goes through a Red Box Pro (DI) -> I connect
it to the "mic input" but for the acoustic guitar I only have a mic
output and I cannot go through the red box...]
And finally, 24 bits are enough?I guess it may influence in the range of
different volumes that you can record (-> to solve the saturation
problems with my records of acoustic guitar)
great thanks in advance!
The only other thing is I may need to buy a decent
soundcard for this
PC. It should have a GM synth (nothing special since I guess I'll be
using soft synths anyway but I don't want to run a synth just to write
a couple of arrangements), one stereo output and one stereo input both
with good overall audio quality. Seemingly, the current trend is
towards either USB 2.0, firewire or PCI. A colleague has just told me
that USB 2.0 is supported by the Linux kernel starting from the latest
version (2.6 I think?) only. Since music distributions are based on
other distributions, chances are that they now run the 2.4 kernel or
maybe older. Does that make sense or am I talking complete b*ll*cks?
Also, this friend has heard about drops happening with audio over USB,
but apparently this was on a Mac and the USB device was a hard disk
rather than a soundcard. Still, he seems to think that USB 2.0 is not
as good option as firewire for audio. (Which reminds me of SCSI vs IDE
drives for audio a few years back, yes SCSI was the serious option for
a couple of years but it was an 80% more expensive as well, and shortly
afterwards IDE started to go "fast enough" and cheaper.) Is firewire
better? Is it more expensive? Also, how does it compare to PCI? Lastly,
if any of you has bought a soundcard (recently so the card is still in
production) which is reasonably similar to what I need (wouldn't mind
if it's slightly better, say 4 mono inputs and 4 mono outputs or
something) and has succeed with having it running under a Linux based
music studio, I'd be grateful if you drop a line.
As far as I know firewire based audio cards still aren't supported by ALSA,
and USB devices aren't that good, especially with jack (a sound server
which you probably *want* to run ;)
Also onboard synths are difficult to find nowadays on pro or semi-pro
hardware, for this is better to stick to an hw external expander or a
soft-synth like qsynth or timidity.
Among PCI cards, one of the best value for price is IMHO the m-audio
audiophile 24/96, which in europe you can find at around 100 eur. It is a
pure stereo card based on the well supported envy24 chip, it has s/pdif
I/O, analog I/O and MIDI I/O :
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Audiophile2496-main.html
I don't owe one, but I have recommended it to a pair of friends and they
seem to have liked it :)
As for 4 I/O, the only one I know is the m-audio delta 44 (around 155 euro
in europe, but *without* s/pdif and MIDI):
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Delta44-main.html
the delta 66 is the same as the 44 but with s/pdif (~ 190 euro).
Then, the cheapest (of which I'm aware of) 8 I/O interface is the staudio
dsp2000 c-port (around 400 euro in EU):
http://www.staudio.com/products/dsp2000.html