Best sound card on the market

If money was not an issue, i would buy this (950US)

http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/2000/2408-mkII.html

For others who listen to music on their computers, even if you aren't going to get a pro-level card, you should absolutely not get a sound blaster. They resample everything to 48000, which can hurt the sound quality. A lot of cheapskate audiophiles use the Chaintech AV710. I think they're like $15.

Hey, anyone have any experiecne with the Digital Audio Labs Card Deluxe?

http://www.digitalaudio.com/DIGITALAUDIO/myarticles.asp?P=5210&S=75&PubID=4401#EmptyAnchor

experience can be spelled many ways in my country.

I bought a new laptop which sounds like shit, serious audio latency issues and distortion when playing audio. I don't know all that much about soundcards, but I use mp3 mixing programs as well, and being able to monitor audio with headphones, and maybe to rip vinyl and record audio here and there.

Can anyone recommend a good, not expensive soundcard to get for someone that's not exactly a musician. Also, will a usb soundcard, plugged in all the times slow down my computer in any way? (I really don't know about these things).

Thanks.

That is: being able to monitor . . . would also be a nice advantage.

what OS are you using? vista? XP? if XP (and maybe Vista?) there's the kmixer issue - Windows handles sound in a shitty way, such that everything passes through the 'kmixer' program which resamples everything to 48000 and generally degrades sound. google "kmixer bypass" and "ASIO" to fix this.

M-Audio makes good external sound cards I think. try to get a firewire one, as firewire is better for audio stuff - usb inherently puts a drain on the cpu. you might also consider, if you're willing to drop the sound recording requirement, getting an external DAC/amp like this one which will improve your sound a lot.

You might also want to think about using a PCMCIA card for this -- the ones I know best (Echo Indigo / Echo Indigo DJ) are a little pricier, but I'm sure there are good others.

I take that back, actually -- the Indigo DJ looks relatively cheap now. (You'd need that one, since it has separate outputs for mixing / cueing)

$89 some places!

my pc doesnt have a firewire port, can you buy a firewire adaptor?

also i currently use the DJIO for djing, but i couldn't get it to work with ableton (to cut latency). is the DJIO purely for playing sound OUT and has no use with a DAW? http://www.numark.com/djio

assuming the DJIO is a no go with a DAW, what's the best quality affordable soundcard out there?

Thanks a lot for the tips!

I'm using Vista (never had these problems with my old laptop which ran XP, though), and my laptop doesn't have a firewire port either, a google search shows there are usb to firewire adapters though, I don't know how that reflects on a computer's memory usage though.

Chances are I'm not going to record/rip stuff too often, although it may come in handy, but what would be nice is to be able to use my mixer with my laptop (in the sense of traktor type programs). I'm not sure exactly what I need when a lot of time this will be just to enhance music played from itunes.

NI, I use the regular Echo Indigo (not the DJ) with Ableton, via ASIO -- input and output both great (and down to relatively imperceptible latency)

I think I might just get this Native Instruments one

which seems reliable, although what should I look out for/beware of (other than the need to make some money before I buy any soundcard!)

ah, this is exactly the kind of thing I've been looking into myself. but I'm a total n00b w/this stuff!

want to do some live recordings for a band. (just a bass+drums duo right now but lineup may expand. who knows?) ideally, we're looking a setup where we could just hit "record" and get a decent recording. maybe something that could be mastered by a pro and subsequently be released with as little embarrassment as possible.

we've got a couple of pretty good mics, so as far as I can tell, I think we just need a) a solid sound card and b) software to record/track/mix etc. right?

want to setup a laptop dedicated just to this. OS would either be windows 7 or windows xp if we go pro tools or cubase. or some flavor of linux if I were to use ardour. (unless something better than ardour exists that I'm not aware of.)

leaning towards windows just we're new at this and feel like there would less confusion avoiding the road less traveled.

any thoughts on this from people who know what they're talking about would be GREAT. (last couple posts seem like a great jumping-off point.)

thanks nabisco, do you know if those echo indigo soundcards can be used on both a macbook pro and a standard pc tower? good review on sound on sound http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr04/articles/echoindigo.htm

still not sure what the deal is with DJIO soundcard, it works perfectly (ASIO, v little latency) on my laptop i've tried sticking it in my pc for cutting the latency when playing my usb midi keyboard and got nowhere. i guess it's only for playing stuff out, hence being a DJ thing and having no inputs, but it cuts the latency for my midi controller so im sure it should work the same way in ableton. once i figure it out i'll explain on here

So how much difference will a just a headphone jack type soundcard make for listening to music off my laptop. Ignoring whatever I said upthread about digital DJ'ing, and not wanting to spend much money, will something like the Creative Labs soundblasters such as this or http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Labs-Xmod-Sound-Card/dp/B000IZ96LQ/ref=pd_cp_e_1_img do anything?

I bought an ibasso d4 dac/headphone amp, it's fantastic (two Dac chips, veryvcapable amp section) but also pretty expensive

Anyone have experience with those creative labs soundblasters, actually? Particularly the Xmod? It'll only cost me like $40 which is just enough that a noticable but not enormous improvement will still be satisfying but that I would be upset if it turned out to be a total waste of money.