Man it seems ages since I last posted - lots of stuff changed but not the interest in audio.

Anyways its nice to be back and see some familiar names and some new

My question was that I have just upgraded my computer to a lanparty nf4 which has the mediocre Karajan audio module. I wanted to do some cassette conversions and I was looking for an external sound card with really good ADA converters but in the consumer price range.

Strangely enough it seems i always fall onto some site that promotes that external sound solutions are better than internal because of the electrical noise and other nasty stuff that lurks inside the computer. Does anyone have any experiments or proof about this claim?
I find it unlikely since there seem to be so few external sound cards and they are certainly of lower quality than the available pci cards.

The 2 USB sound boxes that I could find was the SB Audigy 2 NX, and the M-Audio Sonica Theatre. However both of these seem of lower audio quality than their respective PCI counterparts.

I would appreciate anyones experience with USB external sound

Thanks

try edirol stuff. it's true about the noise though - anything that shares a box with modern computer stuff just doesn't stand a chance. the main culprit i think is "idle cooling", where the cpu flicks between low and high power states when it's idle, causing "motorboating". i may be wrong on the technicals of it though...

also video cards will nuke a sound card's performance.

a USB box will be immune to all that stuff, so long as it has its own power source.

USB sound devices can have other problems, though. A friend of mine once tried one (it was from M-Audio if I'm correct), but it had all sorts of sync problems and the driver stopped working very often. It turned out, that some motherboards have problems with USB devices that need precise timing.

He exchanged it for a firewire device (Motu) and that works very good, no problems at all.

Go for an internal card since you can get good performance for a low price. The E-MU 0404 is a low-priced card which will be much more than sufficient for your purposes. Interference inside the computer only matters if you need very high fidelity.

It's mostly over exaggerated. The inside of a computer is electronically noisy when compared to mundane places like an empty room, but it's really not that bad. Every component has to be certified by the FCC not to produce harmful interference. I don't have stats for the average e-m noise in a computer, but if I am remembering it right it is pretty close to the noise floor of the average chips on the soundcard itself. So you really don't gain much from going external unless you have both very demanding needs and high quality equipment.

Most of the time that there are interference problems they come from specialty components (SFF systems), bad designs (early VIA boards), or integrated sound chips (crap anyways). The biggest source of e-m noise in the computer will be it's power supply (psu) and cooling fans. The psu is inside it's own metal box to block most of the problem. As for the fans, fewer is better for both types of noise from the computer.


That's pretty much all wrong. First, the switch from low to high power cooling only affects the sound noise from the computer, not the electromagnetic noise. It might be annoying for the person sitting next to the computer, but an external sound device won't change that. The fact that the modern cpus can dynamically change clock speed doesn't alter the fact that they operate at high speed on low voltage, and the biggest "antennas" they have are millimeters long. In short, they produce very little e-m around them.

Second, a video card will be one of the least interfering devices on the computer. It does produce some analog noise from the vga circuits, but at a very high frequency. Much above the range of audibility unless you're a bat.

Finally, the power fed to the usb bus is pure 12v straight from the power supply's 12v line. Now, some power supplies have better power than others, but as a class they are pretty good for clean power. They've got big beefy capacitors to smooth out the power as much as possible. Clean power is very important for the rest of the computer components. External power for a usb sound device might be good for other reasons, like powering some high impedance headphones.

I think he meant noise that is usually induced from IRQ sharing.