A/V Sound card for music studio works "decent rig" replacing, asus STX xonar essence

I have a decent pc with a asus sound card.

I am playing with a casio px 350 and want to be able to sing into a mic and play the keyboard same time.

I have a STX sound card but Id like to lean towards having some "music studio" kit.

PCI-E 2 I think, 5 1/4 bays available

Hardware, Software recommendations?

Budget say £500 to add to an already quite decent PC rig.
Intel core i7 2600k
sandy bridge
asus p8z68-v pro
16gb
gtx660ti

2tb sata 3 unused

 

It looks like you want low latency for your audio (critical for recording/live playback), so any decent soundcard will do. Windows on the other hand will not. For a proper audio environment you are either looking at Mac OS X (unlikely given you are building the PC yourself) or a low latency Linux system with JACK and various music programs. Therefore, get components that are known to work well with Linux.

I use a Asus Xonar DX, and I can get ~3ms latency using a real time kernel without cutouts. For a consumer card, that is pretty good. I was only doing playback however, so for recording at the same time you might want a beefier card.

 

I'd go external USB/FW to be honest - a Focusrite or something. Mic pre-amps sound essential, too. Is the £500 to include anything other than the audio interface?

 

USB generally has horrendous latency, firewire is better but you generally don't find FW ports anymore. A breakout box with a PCI-E soundcard will give the best experience, but this gear isn't often cheap. Creative and M-Audio are generally regarded as being high standard

 

The main problem with Windows tends to be if there aren't asio drivers for the card/box - though there's always 'asio for all' which will work with lots of things that only have wdm drivers.

Similarly, by using asio drivers & reducing the buffer size then the latency can be gotten down very significantly, even with non-pcie solutions.


Whilst my main purpose is slightly different, h/w wise, i've just been looking at either -

(a) Echo Audio's Echo 2 (not the Echo AudioFire 2) - which is USB...

(b) M-Audio's Audio Profire 610 A/D - which is firewire - you can use Apple's thunderbolt-to-f/w adapter cable thing with PCs if you've got t/b, or just buy a f/w pcie card...

(c) or, possibly, if i can't justify the extra cost, one of M-Audio's Audiophile cards/boxes

- which should all give enough spare cash for some half decent s/w in your situation.

(my gut atm is that, unless i spot some ridiculous bargain over the next couple of weeks, i'll go for the Echo)


s/w is personal preference though, whilst you could try demos of the cheaper (cut down) versions of Reason, Ableton, Cakewalk, Cubase, etc, it's not 100% clear if you actually need anything more than something like Audacity, which is free.


The other thing i'd potentially consider, if there's money left over, is a SSD 'if' you're using large nos of VSTs, esp large libraries, as it'll vastly improve the sample load times... ...& as a recording buffer of course.

Though if you don't have any SSDs (it's not clear from your spec) then you'd gain more by using it for the OS & programs & whatnot than for VSTs... Recording buffer usage would still be advantageous.

 

I have an mAudio 2496 for that job, but this is PCI only. As suggested, try a Linux with a realtime kernel. Ubuntu studio is perfect and comes will lots of creativity softwares. Just check for the supported hardware.

Thomann web site has a nice selection of soundcard (internal or external) aimed at music creation.

http://www.thomann.de/gb/audio_interfaces1.html

PCIe audio interface are here : http://www.thomann.de/gb/cat.html?gf=pci_express_interfaces&oa=pra

An ESI maya44 XTe could be nice if you wanna go PCIe. It has headamp and +48V phantom pre-amp for you mic.



The only thing you should take into account is that there's only a few music oriented PCIe sound card that are "cheap" (read below 200£). PCI interface are more common.

Since your motherboard has legacy PCI slots, I would really suggested an mAUDIO Audiophile 2496. It has low latency, it is really affordable and has native Linux support. It also has MIDI In/Out for your Casio PX-350



Another PCI solution could be the Infrasonic QUARTET. It has great reviews : http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/proaudio/infrasonic-quartet.html



Available from Thomann for £107 (VAT incl.) : http://www.thomann.de/gb/infrasonic_quartet.htm .... no I do not have positions at Thomann , they just are a great store for musicians

Legacy PCI audio interface are here : http://www.thomann.de/gb/pci_audio_interfaces.html

Hope it helps a little. Good luck with picking a good one

- Guille -

 

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/echo-layla-3g-pci-interface would do you well

 

Well, (and bear with me here, I'm a fairly serious music producer and have a small studio) for the applications that the OP is setting out, and we're looking at using the whole budget, I'd probably have a crack at a RME Babyface or similar (http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_babyface.php), as it's an 'all in one box' solution with decent pre-amps and the like if I was buying new, dropping down to a Focusrite Saffire 2i2 (http://uk.focusrite.com/usb-audio-interfaces/scarlett-2i2) if budget is a constraint.

Both cards have low latency (USB only really starts to become an issue above 8 channels at 24/96 in my experience) and can be used with a whole range of systems - from a notebook to a sizeable rig. The key is decent converters, which both of these interfaces have.

If you want PCI-E, the ESI maya44 XTe mentioned above is a good choice, too.

If you've got Firewire, however, I'd be tempted to track down a decent Avid Digi003 rack. Built like tanks and bloody brilliant (I've got one, and love it).

I'd echo the avoid windows advice given above - all of my production is Mac only (and if you were running a mac, I'd suggest getting an Apogee Duet (1 or 2) - they're first class. As for linux for production? That's out of my experience, sorry!