charlie@joe.surf.com wrote:

Hi Everyone,

This isn't a pd question, but I thought I'd poll your experience because someone here has probably had to make this decision. I am looking for a 'recording studio quality' sound card for a PC.

Here are the basic specs I'm looking for:

1. Full-duplex stereo audio IO at 44.1 kHz / 16-bit. Read as: record

and playback audio at the same time, both at cd-quality. The key phrase here is 'same time'. At the moment I have a Sound Blaster AWE 64 Value Card; this card seems to be capable of recording at cd-quality OR doing playback at cd-quality, but not both simultaneously. At least I haven't been successful in getting this to work.

2. Has DirectX 5 drivers.

3. Works under 95 and NT.

Optional (this would be ideal): 4) Has Midi IO ports built-in

Help is appreciated and apologies in advance if anyone is upset that this is off-topic,

Charlie

I am currently concerned with getting full duplex running with my Turtle Beach Malibu cardunder I linux...full duplex works quite well under NT. Ido not know what the AWE64 situation is, but the chipset in the Malibu can do full-duplex...It happens regularly on wintel platforms, include (shudder of shame) my (small!) NT partition. But I think much better quality can be had . The Malibu (& even more the SB64!!!) have the raw, harse sound of inferior conversion and filtering...It really tires me out to do a lot of listening to the Malibu card...but I have to: the driver for the Fiji is not available under Linux...and I hate Windows with a passion. Period. My Fiji card (also Turtle Beach product) has a *much* finer sound. Subjectively, you can hear the difference as an "openness" and "smoothness"to the well-converted signal, contrasted with a kind of "harseness" and "edginess" on the high frequencies of the poorly converted signal.

With a tendancy towards extreme volume levels , many cannot hear these differences, but they are very real. I think that people wonder why someone would spend from 4 to 100 times what the purchaser of a "high-end soundcard" 'normally' spends (Guessing your AWE64 & my Malibu both run aproximately $100...).... well , ask a professional if they would use a sound blaster card for mastering, and they will say no way. You shouldn't either.and the Fiji is only the low end of quality conversion....actually fairly good for the $470 some-odd dollars they charge. There *are* much better conversion hardware, much more expensive. But withthe Fiji you can also *digitally transfer* the sounds both ways using SP/DIF-AES/EBU format..now *that* is what you want: let the consumer's converters (in the cd, etc.) be the limiting factor in sound quality.

Well, the bottom line is that certain chip sets support full duplex, others don't . the Crystal set in the malibu does support full duplex...if the software is written correctly ! I 've heard the PAS card is full duplex...I'm sure there are others....look around on the net...read up on these cards before purchasing!!!

Good luck.

CharlieB