As my part time moonlighting gig Voice Acting, making sure my recordings are clean, tight and out of sight is a high priority.

I’ve got a computer that is set up to do this.  I have Sony’s Sound Forge, a really clean microphone processor, a Mackie mixer board, a Neumann TL-103 mic… and I had a Creative Labs EMU-0404 audio card in there.

All was great until I had actually switched computers about a year ago. The older computer was slower, had one processor (read CPU) and was just chugging along at a pace I couldn’t deal with anymore.  So, I moved it all to a new computer with more memory, a Quad core CPU and 64bit operating system… simply put it has lots of speed.

Shortly after making the move, I started running into problems with the system giving me a blue screen of death.  It would crash and corrupt the audio I was recording and saving to the point where I couldn’t recover any of the audio after the computer re-booted. This totally sucked, especially when I had over 30 minutes of recorded audio done and saved.  Lots of cursing ensued… I never expected Vista to blue screen on me, well what a fool I was…

So recently I decided to look for a replacement audio card.  The audio interface for your computer is just as important, and in some cases more important than the mic and other items in the microphone chain.  I located an M-Audio Audiophile 192 card that was within my price range.  I ordered it, got it and installed it over the weekend.

Last night was the first time I have used the new setup to record.  I was very pleased! In fact I was actually shocked at how CLEAN the audio was. The creative labs emu-0404 card seemed to have added a TON of noise to my recordings that I wasn’t totally aware of. 

I called a friend and described my success with the new card. He said that my call was perfectly timed because he was experiencing problems with his setup.  He was recording clients and had to spend 3 hours cleaning up the recording and having the client re-record some sections because of random digital audio artifacts making their way into the audio file.

He is using a USB audio device to get the audio into his desktop. He had been for years suggesting that people purchase the USB devices because the quality was pretty good, and allowed for you to be able to unplug them from your desktop and take it on the road, saving a bit of money, so you wouldn’t have to have multiple audio interfaces.

I told him that I thought any USB recording device would never give you the same solid stable quality that a PCI card that sits in your computer does. The reason for this is that the USB device isn’t designed to handle high quality audio. It does handle audio pretty well, but on a chain that you can have up to 127 devices at any time, and the fact that the USB hub installed in the computer SHARES it’s data buss with other devices in your computer (to save money in manufacturing), it is inherently unreliable for professional audio.  And a PCI audio card is on it’s own solitary buss connected directly to the CPU. That’s a big difference.

He’s going to order one today.