Re: Computer Sound

chrisharries@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
All surround speaker sets that cost £100 or less are essentially crap.
They're different flavors of crap so it's up to you to decide what
kind of crap you're willing to listen to. Go to the kind of store that
sells crap computer equipment and tell them that you want to listen to
some speaker systems that cost around £100. That's where you start.

the £100 was for the x-fi sound card "was looking at the x-fire range,
good and about £100 odd
something like Auzen X-Fi Prelude" thats the sound card, NOT the
speakers, at this point I am not putting any money on speakers as I
havn't gone in depth with that, just wondering what sound card and
connectors I need before delving into speakers

OK, this is the end of the market I get involved in:-)
Any sound card that's *considerably* better than the normal home cinema/ gamer stuff or what's on your motherboard will cost well over £100. I use a couple of units. One cost me nearly £400 a few years ago, & works in a PCMCIA slot on a laptop (It's a WAMIBox, if you're interested & can find one on e-bay, I recently saw one being sold for £70ish). This has four analogue outputs, an unbalanced microphone input with no phantom power & a pair of phono line level inputs. The outs & ins are paralelled with optical TOSlink (The square block with the red LED in it)& co-axial (SP-DIF) digital inputs & outputs. It's fairly quiet on playback, & is useable for recording if you're not too fussy. 16 bit conversion on this one.

I also use a Lexicon Omega, (USB interface) which has a pair of single channel line outputs, 4 line inputs & a pair of microphone inputs with phantom power. All these are balanced. It also has MIDI & SP-DIF co-axial inputs & outputs. No surround sound outputs, but it's good for 4 simultaneous channels of recording. It cost me £379 a year or two ago. It's a lot quieter & less distorting than the WAMIBox & uses 24 bit converters.

I've used both of these units to produce (Bottom end of the market) commercial music recordings (Commercial, as in they sold a few hundred copies to fans of the band involved:-) ).

At the hundred pound level, you're looking at middle to top end game/ home cinema cards with features aimed at those markets. My experience is that they're all much of a muchness, with a lot of the smaller brands using the same chipset on their own circuit board layout. They normally only have a couple of inputs, maybe a mic level mono input, & a line level stereo input, both running through mini jacks. Most of them will have outputs for surround sound, though, either as a number of stereo mini jacks or as a digital output to feed into an external decoder. Unless someone here has experience of the precise setup you want to use though, that's about all the help you're likely to get about sound quality here. The external decoder will almost always give better sound quality than the one on the card.
You *could* try rec.audio.high-end or alt.music.home-studio.

Look out for ones sold out of the back of a white van stopped at a
traffic light. Don't buy those.

Yes thank you for making me out to be an idiot

You'd be amazed how many otherwise sensible people do buy them;-)

One thing you need to know about speakers is that to pick the best for your application, you need to listen to each set you're considering in the environment you will be using them in. Even top end speaker sets are sensitive to listening conditions. There are a large number of threads about this both here & in rec.audio.opinion. Even middle of the range speakers can often be helped a lot by room treatment. Google is your friend.

For recording your own mixes onto your computer, you will definitely lose quality using the standard soundcard. (Cheap converters, badly designed auidio grounding schemes inside the computer, lots of electrical interference on power supply & ground rails... The list goes on & on)
I'll likely get flamed for this, but the connectors don't make a great difference to the sound at this level, as long as they make good contact. *However*, those cheap mini jack connectors tend to be fitted to equipment using cheap components on poorly designed circuit boards. Cheap phono to minijack leads also tend to use badly shielded cables and are unreliable in field conditions. Draw your own conclusions here:-)

Also I enver said I have little money, nor do I know nothing about the
subject, just wanted some help in the right direction.

I hope this helps. I've deliberately not mentioned makers' names except for those that I use on a regular basis.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.
.

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