Soundcards

What kind of soundcard(s) you have?
I have SoundBlaster Live 5.1 card (out of date). I dont know which type is better for audio editing/Renoise.

It really depends on what you want to do.
There are excellent entry level cards by Emu (0404) and M-Audio (Audiophile). You should definitely check them out.
I use an M-Audio Delta 44 card. 4x4 ins/outs and it’s overall not bad and latency is fine (I use 6ms). I have it for many years already so I think I will upgrade it in the near future…

I saw in the topic you also mentioned speakers, if you do music purely as a hobby, a set of speakers+sub from the nearest computer store will do just fine. optional, you could also connect a home stereo system (which usually has better speakers than the ones that come in those sets) and connect it via aux.
If you aim to/already produce professionally, you should own a pair of monitors and they come in all price ranges. Tannoys are very inexpensive and not a bad choice at all. ;)

Id like to produce clear and quality sounds/musics. so i still dont know the (Creative) SB Live soundcard is good enough for me.
I will check those emu/m-audio things…
thanks. ;)

A soundblaster is fine until you want to record audio. Then they are like “:[!”

If you want short latencies, then the kxProject drivers will work bring your SBLive Value (and related cards’) latencies down to a tight couple of milliseconds.

Yes. 2ms latency on a $20 soundcard. For voice recording, these cards work just fine. Get a noise reduction VST like reafir_standalone (free) for eliminating low levels of noise, in realtime if you want.

Please sue the god damn Creative for that they ever have tricked you into buying this shit! I was once tricked into buing one of those cards myself, I bought the platinum edition for lot of $$ and was convinced by Creatives false talk that it would be a good card, they also told me that they in the next release of the drivers should release generic ASIO-drivers for the card… and did they ever do so??? NO, they released a new god damn product line instead and the Creative support just told me that they had drooped the thoughts about ASIO-drivers to the Live-series, and referred me to buy an Augity-card instead!!! WHAT? They first tell me that they plan to release ASIO-drivers, so I but a expensive platinum card just because of this, and then just a few month later they tell me to buy a new card and drop my old expensive and shitty card in the trashcan. Creative is the worst company (after Microsoft ;)) I have ever had anything to do with, and I will surely never buy anything from them again, it is sad that they have bought up the old and good sample-manufacturer EMU, so I will never buy anything from them as well…

Yes that was my story, puh, it was nice to vent my spleen upon this shitty company, now I feel much better again :) And remember, never buy anything from Creative or its affiliated companies, if you do not asked for being screwed ;)

An M-Audio Audiophile 2496. Even that this card is a few years old now, it is still a very good card, and probably still the best pro-line card you can get for that price…

I am thinking that better samplerate means better quality. In Renoise i can change the samplerate up to 96000. And the default is 44100. But i dont know why. My soundcard can handle that 96000Hz…

If you raise the samplerate level, you need to set higher up the latency?

thanks

M-Audio: Cheap & Barely Good Enough

If you can avoid M-Audio, I recommend you do. I regret all my M-Audio purchases, their driver support and keeping things up to date sucks, they are always too busy releasing the next thing, full of bugs, sacrificing fixing older items, full of bugs. Especially on the OS X side of things.

If you can’t afford something better, then M-Audio is acceptable, at best.

Higher samplerate can sometimes provide better sound quality since it can reduce aliasing [that we hear]. If you’re interested in this subject you can read this thread at kvr.

But it comes at the price of higher CPU usage. And the latency is actually lower for the same buffer size.

Oh and I think the SB live is a nice soundcard for the money, especially if you don’t do much recording. Of course, you should use the KX drivers, not the Creative ones.

Im using pcmcia ECHO Indigo IO and TC KONNEKT24D for recording and its great dsp powered fx. no probs. tcs card sounds superb.

for speakers its just old B&W, m-audio speakers & shitty microlab for testing routines.

anyway, i want change my studio completely. take some KRK speakers, swap my laptop (its a thick ASUS"15,4 which weights about 4-5 kgs. and imagine when im moving from place to place with this 5kg asus monster and m-audios axiom25 + some stuff like cords, headphones and so on and all packed into Dakine Terminal backpack which is damn good (very strong built, solid, waterproof blabla, but heavy too by itself!!!) for something small (13,14 inches). i want to pick up korgs microkontrol, its very pretty and looks nice, but its lil micro keysn`pads really suck!!! also want to buy another headphones. want some sony or akg. but any other suggestions?

yeah i`m starting offtopping a lil bit…but i have another story about mobile studios.

My friend, DJ Gix (who is supporting me in live gigs), have a more HEAVY package.
Imagine a big, very BIG backpack, where u can find sections for Vestax QFO, 2 gameboys, vinyls, cords, fx pedals, yamaha 8 ch mixer and so on. I even cant imagine how much all this weights!!!

i’ve got echo audio gina3g and esi near05 monitors. sounds nice, but i’d need better monitors for sure.

sb live! is imho not really suitable for more serious music making, you should get something like emu0404, esi julia, m-audio audiophile, esi maya44 etc… plus maybe some nice desktop monitors, m-audio, behringer or tapco make cheap&quite good ones, my esi near05 would also do the job…

EMU 1616M Card Bus.

Excellent card. Solid as hell (if you dont count the pointless DSPs)

Damn. Kawai!!! Its heavy as hell must be!

Well, I know a few other people (IRL ;)) more than myself that own m-audio-cards (Audiophiles/Deltas) and they are all satisfied with them what I know. We all run linux or windows though, so maybe this is a mac osx problem, don’t know… For me the drivers has been very stable and I have never had any problems since I bought the card 5-6 years ago ;) Far from what I can say about that Creative shit I had in the PC I bought back in 2000, that was the worst piece of shit I have ever bought and the worst support I have ever had to do with. And since Creative have bought EMU I guess even EMU will suffer from this nowadays ;)

and btw, nothing in my computer is as old as my audio card (do not remember exactly when I bought it but I think it was about 5 or 6 years ago) and it did only cost about $150 and still last, so it is probably the best computer-component I’ve ever bought (at least to my PC… to my AMIGA i had a few things that did last longer than that) ;)