I'll add a few words on sound cards.
When I was buying one I tried to research as much as possible.
I bookmarked a few sites with audio quality and performance benchmarks.
Perhaps they will help someone facing similar choice.
This is rather for gaming and general audio, not professional sound cards.
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With professional sound cards I believe it starts price-wise with EMU 0404 and ends up with ProTools HD systems, with companies such as Audiotrack, Edirol , E-Mu, ESI, Lynx offering anything from stereo USB interfaces for a 50 bucks up to multitrack recording systems for thousands of $$$...
Anyway when buying a sound card I think it?s good to keep in mind following points:
1) Is it
playback or recording sound card? Quality of analog to digital conversion is a major factor that determines recording quality of a sound card. If card is meant to be used for recording it needs to have good ADC. If used for pro recordings it needs to have balanced inputs for mics. If the card is meant rather for playback then decision needs to be made about digital vs analog outputs
2)
Digital output vs analog output. Is it going to feed a receiver via digital input or are you going to use analog connection? You might save lots of $$$ on sound cards if going digital into the receiver digitally. On the other hand you might decide to use analog connection to the amplifier if your sound card has good DACs. All in all speakers are analog devices so conversion has to be done somewhere. If cable runs are long this might justify going digital however balanced connection might work out better if you have a decent analog amp already. But if you decide to go digital C-Media chip based cards with DDL encoding are worth mentioning. This allows for conversion to ac3 stream from any multichannel source. Keep in mind such conversion is not needed for multichannel audio that has been already encoded into ac3 such as in movies with dolby sound.
3)
Type of interface. PCI, USB, Firewire and PCMCIA cards have their pros and cons. But except for USB1.1 all interfaces offer enough bandwidth for high quality multi-track recording and playback. Since recently there are also express sound cards for laptops but I did not see any benchmarks or decent reviews yet. As for PCIe there are no PCIe sound cards at present except for Digidesign professional cards.
4)
Number of Inputs/Outputs. Straight forward and perhaps the first thing a recordist looks at when buying this piece of gear. General Audio sound cards have up to 8 outputs (7.1) that can be used separately for different signals if the card has ASIO support.
5)
Games and movies or music only? Sound Blaster cards are de facto standard for gaming sound cards. Hardware acceleration, EAX HD support, Open AL and virual surround over headphones are the main features to consider here. As for music-only cards bit-perfect playback and high quality DACs matter most however some manufacturers offer hardware-based processing to enhance sound quality, too.
6)
Bit-rate and Sample-rate CD Quality is 16 bit/44.1 kHz. Any sound card can do that. For better quality look for 24 bit/96 kHz cards.
It's all pretty generic, but I hope it's helpful enough for anyone looking for a sound card. I avoided exact product and pricing info as these things change all the time.
Any of the points made can be researched in depth when comparing any 2 sound cards before buying.
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