[Arny Krueger]

"Richard Crowley" wrote in message


"Trevor Wilson" wrote...

**A Soundblaster Audigy is cheap and will do a superb
job. There are more expensive cards available, but the
differences, with LP recording, will be purely academic.
The software supplied works a treat too. If your
computer has on-board sound, forget it. All the ones
I've measured are crap.

Obviouisly, Trevor hasn't measured any current product, particularly the
products I mentioned in another post on this thread. They are typically what
I'd call -80 dB products - spurious responses and noise are about that far
down. On the best day of its life, Vinyl is what I'd call a -70 dB format,
and that's being generous and allowing for true SOTA approaches.

And soundblaster aren't?

Depends which SoundBlaster and how you use it. The old SoundBlaster 16 and
64 were pretty bad for recording. The Live! started out marginal for
recording, but over the years they've improved it to the point where it is
good enough for transcribing vinyl. The Audigy started out as an improvement
on the original Live!, and has also improved over the years and stayed equal
or ahead of the improvements to the Live!, which continues as a
budget-priced product. The current "Live 24bit" PCI card is not really what
I'd call a 24 bit card, but its pretty good at 16/44

Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB:+0.07, -0.18 (falls off
rapidly above 18 KHz)
Noise level, dB (A): -103.6 Only about a dB worse unweighted.
Dynamic range, dB (A): 92.0 About the same unweighted.
THD, %:0.0067 Lots of spurious responses 95 or more dB down.
IMD, %:0.014 All IM products (18 & 20 KHz) about 95 dB down.
Stereo crosstalk, dB: -101.
IMD at 10 kHz, %:0.014 Rising to about -90 dB at 18 KHz or so.

Not bad for a cheap little PCI card that retails for about $30. The USB
product under the same name is IME far poorer than this, and is worse than
its predecessor, the SoundBlaster USB MP3. Just to compound it's
inferiority, it requires special drivers, while the predecessor product
works fine with the USB drivers that come with XP.

What you get from better audio interfaces $200 is that everything is 5-10
dB better, and the interface may well be capable of operation @ 24/96 and
even sometimes 24/192 data formats. Obviously, true 24 bit performance is
highly elusive, but 16 bit performace is not uncommon, even in budget
products.