RE: 24 bit audio for my laptop
2008/04/04 01:52:27
(permalink)
Just one caveat that I would like to mention....
Laptop designers tend to load up one or two IRQs with all the IO devices on the system, like the USB, Video, Network card, and other drivers. This can cause bottlenecks in the audio IO stream and you hear pops and clicks in your digital audio when this happens. Sonar is especially sensitive to this problem, and requires that audio IO drivers have exclusive use of an IRQ.
For best results, use an IO device for audio that does not share its IRQ with another device driver (if you indeed have a choice). For instance, if you have both USB and Cardbus ports and the Cardbus driver shares an IRQ with the Video driver, then you must use a USB audio device with that machine.
Of course with laptops, you don't always have a choice -- it all depends on your computer's configuration, which is created by the manufacturer. My old ThinkPad T40 loaded USB, PCMCIA, Video, and the wireless networking drivers all on the same IRQ, so I had to live with random, intermittent clicks in my audio stream when I used that machine with Sonar. Tweaking the video driver's PCI latency helped a little, but I never could resolve the problem completely until I purchased a new system.
The fact is that some laptops just aren't suitable for use with digital audio, so if you're planning to buy a laptop, get one from a vendor who understands how to configure a Windows system to meet the specific needs of being a DAW host.