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New Audio Setup

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daschewy

Grizzled Veteran
Jan 9, 2006
1,514
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#1
#2
M-Audio is good for music editing, and well, that's about it.

The only experience I have with M-Audio is ****ty drivers, luckily I got the card for free and directly sold it to get myself a Live! 5.1 Digital. :D
Also it seems you can get an awful lot of BSOD's, but that's a fact you must except when you are using VIA-powered hardware.
 
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#11
The thing I don't like about Creatives soundcards are that they seem a bit "snake oilish" to me. EAX almost never works for me properly and when it does it can't even handle it and my framerate drops unacceptably, so what's the point of even having it? A sound card that needs the CPU's help? Pretty weak IMO. The X-fi series might actually be good but the price is not. I have an Audigy (original). I very much doubt much of a noticable difference between any of the Audigy series (1 up to 4). I don't think pro musicians use Creatives sound cards in their PC's very much. Just check "guitar center" or "sam ash" website to see some of the soundcards made for music making.
 
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#13
im a audio engineer. I currently have a soundblaster live 5.1, I have tried many different cards and have been around even more defferent types of setups. I can say that for myself, the soundcards that i hear are not very good in comparison to real recording equipment. (onboard cards are to close to other elctronics and therefor have a high noise floor.) they tend to murder the lows around 40hz and forget about decent highs above 7000. My quick setup is a edirol ua/1a its a 2in/2out usb da/ad converter. its cheap and works well but has limitations. if your doing any kind of microphone work you want to spend good money on mic pre-amps. the better ones make a huge difference. You can find decent mic-pres in some control boards but dont count on it.
as for speakers, the best ive heard that are cheap are the klipsh promedia series. they even work for dirty mixdowns. there biggest problem is they sound to good, meaning they color the sound so getting a perfect mix is difficult. but the mix you get is still above average. the biggest problem you will find is computer speakers murder sound. I have heard entire intruments go missing from the mix just because of the speakers. It also makes the mastering guy hate you.
I dont know how serious you are, or how much your looking to invest, but ive setup recording systems from $300 to $300,000+. If you like let me know what genre and funds you have and where you want to be afterwards and i can probably piece something together.
 
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#15
If your just doing scratch tracks then anything will work really. If its possible, i would suggest that you go somewhere that has many different types of speakers setup and preview them side by side with a peice of music that you know. This will allow you to see which speakers sound best to you. Those will tend to be the ones you will be the most happy with. Hope it helps.
 
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#17
daschewy said:
yeah, I have XP.

I was wondering if an augidy SE would work well with those speakers? I looked around some for comparable sound cards to the audio-m and the closest I can find are the x-fi, which are way too over my budget.
Click to expand...


Audigy & certain of the X-FI Cards are about to be discontinued... a new high end model is imminent for release.
 
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#18
Mike_Nomad said:
Audigy & certain of the X-FI Cards are about to be discontinued... a new high end model is imminent for release.
Click to expand...
Hmmm, X-fi discontinued already huh? Yeah my next soundcard I will make a concerted effort to avoid creatives cards. Maybe Sondigo or Turtle Beach or some other brand. I have an old Hercules Fortissimo2 that I swear would STILL probably work fine for all current games (they even have XP drivers for it). Creative leaves me unimpressed.
 
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#19
I went with the sondigo card and the X-5300e speakers. I read some of the reviews for the sondigo and it is apparently close in quality to most of the X-fi cards, only thing it lacks is advanced EAX support for games, but I've never really used EAX nor do I own any EAX intensive games. All in all I cant wait till I get it.
 
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