quote:
Originally posted by emh:
I do multitrack audio recording once in a while, and since I use a PC (can't afford a Mac right now), I can tell you that it's better to use a separate PCI sound card for audio recording than it is to use the onboard audio, because PCI cards don't use nearly as much CPU power as the audio on board (at least that's how I understand it). It doesn't necessarily even have to be a thousand dollar multi-channel sound card, a simple Soundblaster card will do as well. (I use a an SB 16 PCI myself)
You are partially correct. The SB Live! and SB Audigy cards have an Audio Processing Unit(APU) kind of like how GeForce/Radeons have a GPU(Graphics Processing Unit). The processing unit allows the card to do most of/all of the work that the CPU would have to do if you have a card without a processing unit. The SB Live!(with the emu10k1 APU) can give your systems' gaming performance an increase of up to 17% and the Audigy(with the emu10k2 APU) can give up to a 25% increase in gaming performance(the Audigy APU does more work in the processing unit than the Live! did) simply because the sound isn't using up precious CPU cycles.
A sound card with an APU also makes it where you can listen to any digital audio on your computer without any of your CPU cycles being used up(your system will perform better while playing like an MP3 w/an APU than it would without one). Of course with a fast system playing digital Audio isn't a big deal no matter what card(I tried my Audigy in an old Pentium 133mhz box I have laying around and I could tell a big difference in it's performance while playing digital audio..a.k.a it didn't slow down because of the music..in my Athlon, PIII and P4 boxes I can't tell a difference though ;P).
When it comes to professional audio work, a card with an APU and a low latency can make a huge difference in how long it takes to do stuff like encoding audio(up to like a 75% increase of performance compared to a soundcard without an APU..WOW!).
Onboard Audio is worse than a soundcard without an APU because your CPU is your soundcard(your CPU is emulating a soundcard). Using onboard audio causes your system to take a big hit in overall system performance when doing anything audio related(playing games, listening to music, etc.).
Your SB16 PCI card doesn't have an APU so you don't benefit from the advantages of an APU..but you are definatley better off with that SB16 PCI than you are with onboard Audio.
BTW, I bet you are wondering what I meant by you were partially correct, huh? Well, there are some PCI sound cards that are nothing more than an Audio Codec(like onboard Audio) and your CPU emulates a sound card and the card in the PCI slot is nothing more than a way to plug in speakers to the CPU emulated sound.
[ October 21, 2002: Message edited by: Zombie9920 ]
