ORIGINAL: SillyGorilla

Mlockett:

I'd get about -50dB of self-noise

I'd noticed that when using my SB Audigy 2, but I'd always thought that was just regular computer noise.

One thing about cards like the Audigy 2: they have cd connections onboard. I you're do pro audio work, don't even connect it. Most internal CD wires aren't even shielded and they're in the most RF noisy environment imaginable. Just set up media player so that it plays audio CDs by extracting data. Noisy internal CD connections is probably the biggest sourse of the noise difference between consumer and pro audio cards. Aside from the noise floor, the sound quality of extracted CD audio is better as well. Of course no pro card even has this connection. I know this is a pretty obvious point, but I'll bet most of the time, people complaining about the Audigy 2 noise floor are just hearing the noise from this connection.

Thanks for the tip!

http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/products/soundcards/

Here are 3 low priced sound cards that I think work great with my Altec Prologic Surround system. The Santa Cruz has interal mixers and channels for audio, line, mic, cd, etc. it also has a graphic equalizer and internal reverb and chorus. These cards are recommended for Movie fans, and Music Enthusiast. My Turtle Beach Santa Cruz came with my Dell System, and it was love right from the start, The New Catalina supports 7.1 Surround sound and it even better than the Santa Cruz.

I don't think an amateur Songwriter, or Musician could find a better card for the Price. Don't buy it for the internal Synth, but for low noise and useability it's Great.

I hesitate to reply to this at all because of the absolute ignorance on the Net about everything in general, but...anyone who can't get terrific sounds out of a SB Live or later SB card simply doesn't know what they're doing. I use an Echo MIA card these days but can't really say there's a difference. The noise floor in a SB Live is around 90db. That's as close to dead silence as you're ever gonna need. I've got recordings with as many as 28-tracks that I've made on the old SB Live and there's not a tad of noise on them. If you stick to the recording defaults of 16/48 that the card is meant to be used at, there's not a thing in the world wrong with a SB Live.

I haven't tried either the Audigy or Audigy2 but I can't believe they're worse.

I've posted plenty of samples of work I've done with the SB Live before and had people try to figure out which tracks were done with the SB Live and which with the Echo MIA and no one's been able to tell the difference yet. It's like trying to find someone who can tell the difference between recordings at 16/44.1 and 24/96. Regardless of the great ears everyone claims to have, no one can tell the difference when you test them on it. Besides, it never fails that every kid who gets on the Net and posts, "This is crap!", and talks about their great gear, always has music files that sound like they were recorded by a 6th grader. Ever listen to anything in the "Songs" forum? It's totally sad in there.

I'll offer only one sample. It has 26-tracks as I recall and not a single hokey midi instrument, or keyboard of any kind. Everything was recorded via microphone except the electric guitar which went through a VAMP and the acoustic guitars were recorded with a Sunrise pickup through a BOSS AD5 preamp. This song won't make it to an album because I hate the vocals. But the sound is quite satisfactory. I dare you to find any noise in it.

http://deep.phpwebhosting.com/~hackett/arrow.mp3

I can assure you that my much ballyhooed Echo MIA card sounds no better whatsoever. Nor will yours.

I'm a total newbie, so please be patient with me...

I too have been looking at the Audigy 2 zs Platinum Pro. My current gear is a Tascam 424, so I am obviously well behind the curve in digital recording. I would best describe myself as a songwriter/hobbyist and am not looking to sell my recordings or release a mass marketed cd or be a professional recording engineer...I just want to make some adequate demos. I listened to Joe Bravo's MP3 from the previous post and that sounded just fine to me.

I am also interested in the Audigy's firewire ports so I can connect my DVR to fiddle with home movie fun. I have a Dell P3 running windows 98 that is used by my wife and kids, so I can't really consider using this machine as a full blown studio anyway.

I have been a cakewalk user for years and currently have Pro Audio 9 that I've barely used.

Can the Audigy 2 (I should also mention that there is a $50 rebate that brings the cost of the platinum pro down to $150) be adequate for my meager ambitions?

May I also ask if the Audigy and my copy of Pro Audio (I have no other external gear other than my guitars, keyboard, effects box and mics) will be enough to make rudimentary digital recordings?

Hi gbhost.

Yes. I used the Audigy 2 Platinum EX for a couple of years without any major problems (no glitches, crashes etc). The 16bit 48kHz ASIO drivers worked pretty well in Sonar, and I was able to actually route things to the onboard DSP of the card! Yep, a hardware reverb on an aux send... pretty neat, and its DSP effects aren't too bad either. You'll be stuck with WDM for Cakewalk 9 though. If you aren't a purist looking for a bit-perfect recording, and want to dabble with games, multimedia (DV, firewire etc) then the Audigy is for you. It is a good 'all-rounder'. Just remember to keep your sample rate at 48kHz because that's what the card operates at internally, and the Emu 10k1/2 chips are locked at that. However, I'm aware that the Platinum EX I had contained some decent ADCs in the breakout box (Texas Instruments made I believe) which would work at 24bit and AFAIK, when using the 24bit 96kHz ASIO driver, this bypassed the Emu chip and also the 48kHz lock, so it was possible to work at 24bit 96kHz, using the ASIO driver without access to the onboard DSP effects of the card (since they are part of the Emu chip). Remember, you'll need Sonar 2.2 or later (or any other ASIO compatable host) to be able to use ASIO drivers though, and search the forum to see why it's preferable (but not necessary) to work in 24bit, and also for information on how digital audio works, with explanations of samplerate and bit depth. If you set the samplerate to something else using the WDM driver, it will just resample to 48kHz, send the signal through the card, then resample back to what you set it to anyway and that's where you'll lose a bit of quality. Convert to 44.1kHz from 48kHz if you want to create a CD compatible track at the end of your mix. I'm not too sure about the quality of this conversion process in Cakewalk 9 but Sonar 3.1.1 does this extremely well. You can always export it as 48kHz and convert it in Sound Forge or something else with a high quality algorythm if Cakewalk isn't up to it. Good luck, and if you get any trouble or don't quite understand something, ask away and the lovely people of these forae will give you a helping hand.

Regards,

Neil.

I just got into this whole DAW thing myself, and an Audigy 2 came with the Dell Dimension XPS system I recently purchased.

I just got a very lengthy private E-mail from somone on this forum on this very topic. He used to work as a tester for Dell, and gave me the inside scoop.

Without going into too much detail he basically told me that if I'm serious about DAW, I had just made a 2.4Kilabuck mistake.

He told me that the tech team for Dell put zero thought into configuring the unit for DAW applications despite his pleas. Their rationale was they believed the market was too small, and they wanted to focus on gamers who buy new machines at a clip of about once every 9 months (I found that hard to believe, but I'm just repeating what the guy told me)

he basically said with the combination of the Motu and the Firewire port that I should be getting excellent s/n ratio (which I do) but I was going to have problems with driver stability (which I do) and latencey (which I do) (I can't even run a plug-in without the entire system locking up forcing me to hard reboot.

He prasied the Audigy 2 as being one of the best cards ever made for it's class, but not a good choice for DAW.

He also said the motherboard for the XPS was also going to be a problem for me as it is not optimal for DAW.

I agree with the other poster about the onboard synth, It really comes in handy sometimes. Especially for me since I can't use plug-in's without crashing.

Be that as it may I won't be getting a new card for this unit.

I'm just gonna go whole hog and buy a Mac, and decide what to put in it then.

"(I found that hard to believe, but I'm just repeating what the guy told me)"

Yeah, well...I wouldn't put too much stock in half the info you pick up from the Internet. There's an awful lot of kids in Internet forums desperate to be "somebody" if you get my drift. I mean, really, I won't snow you, I'm 45, and I'm not a computer scientist. I "did" go thru a 1-year certificate program in computer repair from a local Jr. College in the late 80's, but that doesn't make me an expert in anything. I work on my own box and those for family and friends, but I don't work on computers for a living. I've been very involved with "using" computers for quite some time however; I know and use about 50-plus programs including a lot of video, audio, and graphics and many, many office oriented proggys. Here's a screenshot of just a few I have in shortcut folders:



I repeat, I'm no expert, but I've been doing this computer thing a long time and I have the advantage of having owned a couple of SB cards myself as well as 2-Dell machines, so I think I can at least speak from common sense and firsthand knowledge about your situation, if not as an expert. And unlike the "talkers" on Internet forums, you'll notice that I'm about the only guy who has actually posted material recorded on both an SB Live and a higher end Echo card. The SB detractors generally just talk....

Unless you got a faulty card out of the box, (which is rare), then there's obviously another problem. I don't know diddly about MOTU products or how they work with SB cards. But I'd like to try and help you with your problem if I can. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to run a ton of DirectX effects with your setup. You've got a fly in the ointment somewhere and its not likely with the SB card. Chances are that you'd have the same exact problem with any other card. Are you using the firewire port on the Audigy unit? Don't! Get a dedicated firewire card for your firewire transfers. How many processes are running when you bring up Task Manager? If there's more than 15 or so, you need to turn some stuff off. Are there programs placing themselves on startup during the boot sequence? If you aren't sure, there's a great free program called Startup Control Panel that will help you get junk off the start menu here:

Startup Control Panel

You might be surprised just how much stuff is loading itself at startup, everything from printers and scanners to...well, all kinds of stuff. The only thing you want on from boot up are Windows processes. You can safely remove anything else by taking a checkmark out of the box. (This is a great program anyway; if you ever get a virus or Trojan, they can often be disabled from this program.)

Go through every single program you have and make sure that nothing (including Windows) can do automatic updates.

Disable System Restore from all drives.

Under System Properties "Advanced Tab" and on the "Performance Tab" choose, "Settings", then under visual effects, "Adjust For Best Performance", and under "Advanced" make sure "Performance" is checked in both boxes. You should generally allow XP to choose your page file. It does this much better than older versions of Windows did. Every so often though, its good to shut off the page file and defragment the Windows Hard Drive so the page file can get defragged, and then restart and go back to letting Windows choose your page file size again, then reboot again.

Obviously, go into CMOS and change it so that the system board sound is disabled.

Make a habit of deleting temp files after every boot up and defrag at least twice per week.

Also, read my post here because I list a few more tools that are nice to have:

Tools

A lot of guys will tell you stuff about partitioning hard drives and messing around with shared IRQ's. That's stuff from the stone age. There's no point whatsoever in partitioning hard drives on machines running Pen 3's and later. And XP seldom has problems selecting proper IRQ's. Changing your soundcard slot generally won't help, but it doesn't hurt to try as a last resort.

I'd like to know if you have problems running effects when your MOTU unit isn't hooked into Firewire.

Joe

Oh, and if you're using midi and/or the Audigy's onboard synth, then by all means do as Neil suggested and download the ASIO drivers. The mixer that comes with it is a little difficult to get the hang of but it will certainly help with midi latency. I don't use midi but everybody seems to agree that these drivers help trmendously with it.

Sorry for taking so long to respond, and thanks for the advice. I will try out the things you suggested for sure. You are not the first to advise getting a dedicated firewire card, so I'll definitely give that a try. In fact the poster I was reffering to (who prefers to remain anonymous) also mentioned I should get a dedicated firewire connection if I want to stick with the Audigy. (he was actually very complimentary about the Audigy overall)

In fairness to the other poster, he too claimed to have pretty impressive credentials working with computers. He didn't seem the type that wanted to spout off about his knowlege on the forum because he sent me a very lengthy run down about Dell and the Audigy card via private e-mail, so his motive was definitely not to try and impress other forumites.

Thanks for the encouragement. I am eager to try the things you and others have suggested and I am very curious to see what Audigy owners have to say when Sonar 4 is released. I mentioned this in another thread. In light of the fact that S4 is going to support surround sound, there is no way they didn't do some tweaking of their own to make Sonar run more smoothly with the Audigy series in general.

I have always thought that Audigy bashing was a bit fishy since so many people with excellent credentials say otherwise. I checked the list of Twelve Tone approved cards for Cakewalk, and Audigy cards were on it, including mine, and the June 2004 edition of PC upgrade magazine had a feature on a DIY DAW and they picked the Audigy 2 ZS Gamer as their sound card of choice.

Anyway thanks to you and the others who have given advice as to how to optimize Audigy 2 in my workstation. I'm already begining to see some results, and realizing that part of my problem is sheer user ignorance on my part.