Which Sound Card To Buy

[steve-pressman]

I am getting fed up with the on board sound of my motherboard ASRock N68S.

I have a budget of about £50 to purchase a new sound card. Just wondering what you guys recommend bearing in mind I live and will purchase in England.

I use two OS on my PC one for pod cast and CD production using Steinberg's Wavelab that's on my XP Disk and mostly on Win 7 I use it for general music listening MP3's Youtube etc.

Thanks in advance

Steve

 

[torrentg]

Install the latest driver for your onboard audio:

http://www.sevenforums.com/sound-audio/3756-latest-realtek-hd-audio-driver-version.html

 

[steve-pressman]

I have already done that as and when they become available.

Steve

 

[Qdos]

I have my eye on an Onkyo card, which is gorgeous, and although I think it runs in substantially above your budget I can sympathise with your experience with onboard sound on a huge number of mainboards...

 

[torrentg]

What seems to be the problem with the onboard?

How much are you looking to spend? Do you plan to do any music recording or editing? Or just for listening?

 

[steve-pressman]

Problem is crackling, drop outs fading in and out of sound, I might add this is only happening in Win 7, in XP I have no problems what so ever.
As for spend and usage I put that in my original post

Steve

 

[torrentg]

Go into the motherboard bios and disable any cpu throttling. Or disable any software that throttles the cpu that starts with Windows from starting in the first place.

On Asus, it's called Cool N' Quiet. Your board will be different.

Run Windows in high performance mode along with that and issues are fixed.

Enjoy.

Look at any MOTU firewire gear if you want to get serious. It's top-notch professional high end, excellent and can not be beaten. See my specs. That's really only if you want to record from multiple sources simultaneously. If only for listening, it's a bit too much lol.

 

[steve-pressman]

Ok have turned off the AMD Boost in the Bios and that has kind of made things worse

I was just listening to some music and downloading Quicktime when the sound starts to jitter all over the place and the mouse is jumping all over the place too That seems to be my main gripe with the on-board sound card and it is pissing me off big time

Ok my moan is over

Steve

 

[Qdos]

I thought you were just a budding audiophile, complaining at the lack of depth from onboard soundchip solutions...

 

[steve-pressman]

Not quite but I am a semi-retired DJ and my last Sound card died so since then I have been using the on-board sound chip. I just want something that works and does just basic sound recording in Wavelab and Cuebase.

My last Card was a Creative Labs Sound Blaster S80410 which worked great until it died

Steve

PS But if I win the lottery I will be looking at some of the suggestions

 

[thefabe]

That's about $82.37 US. Where are some of the sites your looking to purchase from? If your board has a PCI-e 1 x here is an Asus Xonar for 45 pounds on Amazon UK Vista drivers though so?? http://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-Xonar-...?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1260113144&sr=8-16