Comments

farss wrote on 2/5/2004, 4:33 AM
Sure
M-Audio Firewire 410. Got mine for USD 399 which compared to local price was a steal. Might have a bit more than you need but it's not that much more and then you wont be kicking yourself for not spending those few dollars more.
logiquem wrote on 2/5/2004, 5:53 AM
Do you need stereo in out only? Do you need mic preamps?
FuTz wrote on 2/5/2004, 7:37 AM

And I overheard a conversation the other day in some store between a vendor and a customer and he was telling that with this card, what is nice is that you can function without a mixer. Which is a very good point if you consider a "minimal kit" for the road too...
(M-audio FiWire 410)
beerandchips wrote on 2/5/2004, 10:42 AM
2 x 8 24-bit/96kHz analog I/O; 192kHz stereo out

2 mic/line ins w/ preamps and phantom power

8 line outs to mixer or direct surround output

S/PDIF digital I/O w/ PCM, AC-3, and DTS support

1 x 1 MIDI I/O
zbig wrote on 2/5/2004, 3:40 PM
All the techno jargon is largely lost on me. I do want to have a better sound coming out of my soundcard than I presently enjoy and I would like to be able to do voice recordings for dubbing purposes. So stereo in and stereo out seems to be a requirement. The mic preamp question is one I can't answer 'cos I don't understand the question!

If you have an FW external sound card attched to a laptop does that mean that you can play the laptop's inbuilt CD/DVD player through it? Or does the FWSC rely entirely on inputs sourced from outside the laptop?

It strikes me that I need to ask a more fundimental question. Does anyone know where I can read a "kiddies-level" tutorial on all this stuff?
FuTz wrote on 2/5/2004, 3:50 PM

LOTS of info concerning sound somewhere in this site:

www.locationsound.com
AudioIvan wrote on 2/5/2004, 5:21 PM
Get Creative Sound Blaster Audigy for laptops.Supports every known format,
very good sound card.Have look at the creative web.
farss wrote on 2/5/2004, 6:09 PM
IF all you want is something for playing back the audio the take you're pick, Creative stuff is OK for that job. The pros will dump on you fro even thinking about using anything made by Creative but if it's onlu for listening it's not going to make a shred of difference to your production.

Unless you take your audio seriously and intend to spend a bundle on speakers as well that is.
MyST wrote on 2/5/2004, 6:23 PM
"but if it's onlu for listening it's not going to make a shred of difference to your production."

It will if you have driver problems that cause your laptop to choke. Creative drivers have a reputation for being problematic.

The firewire410 does seem like a full package with no reason to need to upgrade anytime soon.

M
ibliss wrote on 2/5/2004, 6:34 PM
Creative do indeed have a bit of a unfavourable reputation with the pro audio crowd, partly to do with hardware, partly because of the drivers and 'support'.

But then M-Audio don't exactly have a clean slate either.

logiquem wrote on 2/5/2004, 8:05 PM
You have many different choices from Edirol. Works really well without any problem with any computer i tried. Just figure this as an external good quality soundcard doing all the sound in / out task for multimedia.
AudioIvan wrote on 2/6/2004, 2:01 AM
@ farss,
Creative may not be in the Pro section SoundCards, but some models realy do standout.One of them is Platinum ZC Pro.
I used M-Audio products back in my early audio days and I can assure you,they make very good products.If someone wants to go Pro then my choise is MOTU.Curently I use the Platinum ZC Pro because I switched sites(from audio to video) and I've sold my audio studio.All I can say is so far I'm happy with the card.One of the very known problems with Creative is that they don't handle 44.1 kHz very well, appart from that nothing wrong with Creative.
Also there is very interesting info on Tom's Hardware Guide about the difference in quality between computer and home entertainment speakers.
The new decoder from Creative will be my next purchase.

AudioIvan
farss wrote on 2/6/2004, 2:17 AM
AudioIvan,
I wasn't knocking Creative, quite the contrary!
Some of the stuff they had out a few years ago made claims that really weren't true like being 24/96 when they were internally downsampling with not so good results.
Also a lot of their users were having major dramas with the firmware on the card being overwritten. I read through 100s of pages of posts and basically Creative were relying on the users to fix the problem for them.
I nearly bought the same card as you're talking about. What swayed me was the 410 was only a $200 more in local dollars as I imported the it from the US and despite my thinking after I'd ordered the 410 that I'd never need the balanced mic ins two days ago I sure needed them. Not for anything serious, just a quick and dirty 15 sec VO recorded in the loungroom.
I'm also certain that Creative give you more bang for your buck, they've got the sales volume to do it,. It's really the law of deminishing returns. An extra 10 dB of headroom can cost you 10 times as much and 90% of the users don't need it.
AudioIvan wrote on 2/6/2004, 2:49 AM
All true, I agree.
BTW, how did you go with the conversion,did you try it?
Today I'm finishing a project, encoding with Canopus Procoder Express and
extensive AVIsynth filtering.Do you use AVIsynth?For me it's a must in every project.You know it's very nice to talk to people that they don't think that "they know everything" and share opinions.
I know this is OT but anyway...

AudioIvan
farss wrote on 2/6/2004, 3:56 AM
I haven't tried AVISynth as yet, I had a quick play around with VurtualDub's DeFlicker but the flicker I was trying to deal with was way way too slow for it to come to grips with.

My problem is I don't have any high quality multistandard monitors here. I can get access to some very serious gear but it all runs SDI and DigiBeta, they don't have anything that'll play DV25 in the station!

If I ever find a client that CARES what something looks like I'll invest more time in it. You know I spent a bit of time over the last few days working on a corporate and at the last minute the client rings me to say to pull most of the nice looking stuff out 'cause it looks like they used a pro to make it!
These guys had used a PD150 and tried to edit in camera, what a mess. And that's before I mention the audio mess.
As for encoding, well I mostly just stick with the MC encoder that came with Vegas, I've found TMPGEnc does a better job but hey if the client doesn't give a rats why should I. I have enough trouble getting them to pay for my time as it is. I do a lot of work as a subcontractor and he complains my work is too good.
One day I'll buy a decent hardware encoder, not for the quality but for the speed. I know two guys who make commercial DVDs, one has an encoder that takes anything in, upto HD, cost $120K, the other guy has a hardware encoder that cost $500. To master a PAL DVD he plays out a NTSC DVD in a player, through a $500 NTSC to PAL converter and then into the encoder. Now guess what, no one has ever complained about the quality of his DVDs.