So . . . how important is the quality of your sound card when using "Export Audio" ?

Pretty sure the sound card will let you hear things a certain way, and more importantly, when recording into them, their quality will certainly reflect the audio quality of what you record.

As far as exporting audio, I am 99% sure it doesn't matter what card you have. The file will get processed by sonar, and how it sounds depends on what you play it on whether it is that sound card you use with your computer or the radio in your car.

With a sound interface, you want:
1. good cnverters and decent preamps if they have them
2. good low latency performance (this comes down to drivers pretty much
3. you want the interface to have what you need - i.e. enough inputs, outputs, midi capability, whatever you need

Again, the sound interface/card will not effect an export if I am correct. It will effect what you hear when you play music through it and you judgments according to the quality of that sound when mixing, and it will effect the quality of what is recording into sonar or any program via going "through" that interface/sound card.

Lance

Lanceindastudio


Pretty sure the sound card will let you hear things a certain way, and more importantly, when recording into them, their quality will certainly reflect the audio quality of what you record.

As far as exporting audio, I am 99% sure it doesn't matter what card you have. The file will get processed by sonar, and how it sounds depends on what you play it on whether it is that sound card you use with your computer or the radio in your car.

With a sound interface, you want:
1. good cnverters and decent preamps if they have them
2. good low latency performance (this comes down to drivers pretty much
3. you want the interface to have what you need - i.e. enough inputs, outputs, midi capability, whatever you need

Again, the sound interface/card will not effect an export if I am correct. It will effect what you hear when you play music through it and you judgments according to the quality of that sound when mixing, and it will effect the quality of what is recording into sonar or any program via going "through" that interface/sound card.

Lance

I have released songs in the songs forum where the final master was from my old laptop with a realtek. I then took the exact project to my DAW and exported it there (with a 'quality' interface). Null test was perfectly nulled, IIRC.

Where it would make a difference is first during mixdown if you take the output of the audio card and mix it back to 2 tracks in the box(DAW) getting the mix ready for mastering. If you have a hybrid system it would make a lot of difference to the quality of the analog output and the final digital file you create. So the soundcard could make a big difference.
 
For exporting, the quality of the DA of any soundcard is going to influence your decision making regardless of what the digital file ends up being stored as. There are sonic differences in soundcards that would make you boost or cut a certain frequency from one to the other.

 

yeah if ya go old school like that and actually record an output from an interface in real time instead of just bouncing from sonar, totally.

Bapu, I rest my case! Thank you for confirming my last 1% lol

I have met both of you in person and you and Middleman are both top notch no BS people on this forum. 

Cheers,

Lance

Middleman


Where it would make a difference is during mixdown if you take the output of the audio card and mix it back to 2 tracks in the box(DAW) getting the mix ready for mastering. If you have a hybrid system it would make a lot of difference to the quality of the analog output and the final digital file you create.

So . . . what I am hearing in my monitors is totally the audio card generating sound, and Cakewalk only colours the output with whatever plugs are added to the sound path ? When I Export to Audio it is a different sound path than the monitors ?

Thanks Lance, a truly professional response, might just cut and paste this into my audio tips file.

The audio interface could in theory not exist on your system but you could still export audio.

That should tell you how important it is.

Sonar is totally responsible for the number crunching during export it isn't a function of the sound card.

The quality of the room and your monitors has the biggest effect on the choices you make when mixing.  The small differences between the output of modern audio cards (including an onboard Realtek) is pretty much insignificant compared to this.

The case for a top end sound card lies more in the quality of the pres the amount of I/O it provides and its ultra low latency performance.

I confirmed this with Noel:  Exporting audio is pure math.  It does not use the audio device at all. 

One important thing you must not forget...

A lot of the "FX" like audiosnap and V-Vocal as examples have at least 2 or 3 quality settings.
When you hit the Play button to hear your mix in real time Sonar will default to using lower quality/"faster computing" settings in order to keep up with all the calculations required.
When you "export to audio" the high quality settings are used by default as there is no "real time" requirement, so small anomalies you may hear from, say, v-vocal will dissapear in the exported version.

This does mean that in practice the exported version will sound slightly different to what you hear when you simply press Play, but hopefully in a better way.

There is a way around some of this, and that is to render individual tracks first to force using the high quality settings, (bounce to track), though you still have the same issues with FX on the Master bus.  Rendering the Master bus is, by definition, exporting to audio...

It should be noted though that none of this is affected by the quality of the soundcard as the soundcard simply converts the final calculated data stream to audio.