Garbage In, Garbage Out

[nyyki]

I've seen this so often that I can't count it.

"I'm having problems using my computer to record. I'm working on an album, but things sound lifeless and strange. I have a top of the line Soundblaster, but it just doesn't seem to get what I want recorded. Is it my software?"

No, it's your sound card.

A sound card isn't an audio card. They're two very different things.

A sound card is a multi-purpose card that has a microphone in, Line in, line out, and sometimes a headphone out. It has a software synth, some sampling capability, and maybe a couple of other things. Sound cards are designed for consumer level applications where you want to skipe your friends or use a webcam, play games, and do a few other things. They're optomized for this, and this means that frequency response is not flat -- otherwise you'd have feedback problems from your microphone. This means they're especially bad for recording things in the same range as vocals, like guitar, piano, organ, and of course, voice.

An Audio Card is a special card that usually has at least stereo in and out jacks and may have a lot more, including digital I/O and MIDI I/O as options, along with things like word clock and other formats. Audio cards have really high specs, and most of them now handle 24 bit recording at 96KHz or even higher specs. These cards are mostly just analog to digital and digital to analog converters, and their frequency response is ruler flat. What you record is going to sound exactly like it went in. Also, Audio cards do their processing on the card instead of relying on the computer's processor to do it. (No Soundblaster after the AWE64 Gold does on card processing) This means that an audio card isn't going to cost you tracks, speed, or processing. And audio cards tend to have lower latency in their drivers, again because the processing is on the card.

Bottom Line: You're not going to get professional quality recordings on a sound card. I don't care what the sound card company says. Too much has to be compromised to cover all the bases a soundcard has to cover to allow you to get professional quality recording. Anyone with good ears will be able to tell the difference.

And the reality is that good audio cards aren't expensive. The M-Audio Delta 1010LT is about $200, and it has 8 pairs of analog in's and outs, plus MIDI and S/PDIF I/O for digital transfers. That 's dirt cheap for a top quality audio card that is still being supported and will do an excellent job of recording a project. And if you don't want to go that route, there are lots of USB microphones out there now that will also get you excellent results. You'll have to do things one track at a time, but it's a rather inexpensive way to go about things, and since Audacity is free, that's a good way to get into a 16 track recording studio for very little money but still have excellent quality.

Comments

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

For people who are too ridiculously cheap to get a real audio card, I suppose a de-emphasis filter in software DSP could fix a few of the things that are wrong with sound card audio input, especially if you know the pre-emphasis curve pretty well from, say, calibrating with pink/white noise sources. Not all of them, but for someone just starting out who has yet to get paid for audio work, it might be a marginally viable temporary fix.

But then, you know me, I come from the "get it done with what you have" school. You've bugged me about my open-source solutions before. :D I do need to get a decent multitrack audio I/O so I don't have to settle for live-to-2-track recording (sometimes you DO need to get in and actually clean up the mix, and it's kind of nice to lay the effects on after the input so you're not permanently stuck with a wet track if it's not "wet" in quite the way you wanted .. :p )

[nyyki.livejournal.com]

Ithink it'd be possible to do that, yes, though it'd take far more knowledge than the standard beginning audio engineer has at their beck and call. This is more a solution for the engineer who finds herself or himself recording in a sub-standard setting after developing some serious chops.
The entry point for multi-track I/O is very low these days, so it's worth it to save the pennies and get a good recording solution that supports at least four and possibly more tracks. You're right about being able to print FX after tracking, and how much that frees up things, especially with all the great freeware VST's these days. I'm especially impressed by some of the free compressors, like the one Reaper just released, and the amp simulators. It's rather nice to record a guitar direct to the board, then decide if you want a Fender Twin, Vox AC30, or Marshall stack at mixdown, for example. And some of the room impulses you can get now are wonderful. Having the ability to put a band into the Village Vanguard, War Memorial Opera House, or the Meyerson by setting one menu setting is a gas, and really helps in building the ambiance nicely for particular works.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

And you're right, one of the things that can't be fixed is the bare minimum sampling quality of most sound cards. 24 bits/96 KHz oversampling on the inputs does pay off at the output, even if you are downsampling to 16 bits/44.1 KHz, especially if you're using any compression at all in post-production. Compress 16 bit audio even a little, and you'll hear the quantization noise at the bottom end, trust me ..