Hello. I am just considering buying a new laptop. The first things we look at are a CPU and a price, of course, graphic card, etc. But how about a sound card? Are there any laptops with embedded good ones? I would like to be as compact as possible. I am not asking about external/USB devices. Is there a wide variety of sound cards like graphic cards? Thanks

 

The disadvantage of a notebook compared to a PC with a larger housing is that you cannot change anything. The manufacturers have also left no space to add something afterwards and everything is permanently installed. In short, it's just too flat to retrofit.

 

Integrated laptop soundcards are good for zoom meetings only, not for audio productions. Of course: you can use your laptop directly connected with speakers and compose music with a daw, but you will then notice various problems:

• Poor quality of AD/DA conversion
• Poor mic recordings
• High latency
• No line in input
• Poor connectivity (just a minijack connection)
• No physical controls (volume, gain, mono / stereo switch, etc)
• No headphone out
• No phantom power

In a couple of days using the internal soundcard of the laptop you will figure out that it is not really possible to work in this way, at that moment you will feel the need for an external audio interface.

 

You can make do with an internal one, given the provision that you work ITB only, don't use it for recording, install a low latency driver (I prefer ASIO4All), and if you use headphones, only use low impedance ones.

But apart from the issues @recycle mentioned (some which may apply) is that the DAC is invariably close to other components, and as of such it's very very prone to EM interference: i.e. annoying noise which is related to what the computer is doing on top of background hiss.

 

Get something like the Evo 4. Is not to bulky and will give you good drivers and a decent A/D for the price. If in the box then asio4all would work, but the moment you want to add vocals, guitar you will appreciate the versatility an audio interface can give you.

 

Is it any point to buy M-audio fast track pro? I read good reviews about it. But it is old.

 

look at gaming laptops there usually the ones that offer the best all round performance to cost.
plus will most of the time have a soundcard built in to.
Also beat16 you can upgrade laptops they have actually become really easy to do these days. well hard drive SSD ram Battery etc are really easy to upgrade.

 

Holy words of the old 16-beat man!

 

I'd say you could get by with the quality of an internal card. Of course not expecting high quality. But the connectivity is what kills the deal.

Even if you find one with line in you can't connect guitars, bass, etc... due to electric limitations (the famous impedance and so on)
The latency depending on your needs could also be a no-go.

 

If the laptop have firewire port choice firewire soundcard usb ones can be unstable

 

I am going to change my laptop soon. They don't offer firewire for £1300. There are Thenderbolt 3 and USB-C but not Firewire.

 

I had the iD14 Mk1 and only stopped using it because I got an RME UFXii. Something like the iD4, or anything from Focuserite, Motu or similar in that 100-200 price point will undoubtably make your experience better, and will serve you for years. It’s better to spend that little bit more now and you will be happy. The tech has come so far.

 

FUCKING NO
FW is dead.
Compatibility was such a big hassle back then but now...... i would not want to think about.
USB2 is plenty fast for everything under 60channels most of them are stable enough
on notebooks WiFi is a major latency culprit, and stupid win services.

you are shit out of luck since there are no oldskool expansion ports any more
there could have been something like this
ExpressCard

 

You can call me deaf, but I use a Dell Latitude 5470 (i7-6820) with a 24Bit Realtek onboard card, which goes theoretically up to 192 khz, but I mostly drive it on 48 kHz because of my preferred workflow (playing in realtime with arpeggiated/sequenced vsti synths).
It has some latency, but most of that comes from the infamous acpi.sys that plagues most Dell laptops in terms of latency and is quite unremovable without risking the systems' stability or the system itself. I guess that would not change with an external USB interface. Until now, I was often tempted to buy a USB card of the likes of Steinberg, Focusrite, ESI...but always refused in the end. The reasons are:

• I find at least the output very clear and decent, both with headphones and active monitor speakers. so I am generally satisfied with that.
  
• The buffer size in Asio4all is bearable with 128 to 256, with some projects I can even use 64 without any glitches (that depends mostly on the vst and vsti used).
• I do not want to handle an addditional box during travel (in the train for instance) and if I do not always use the external interface I have always to reconfigure DAW outputs which is annoying at best.
• There are luckily no artifacts or disturbances in the audio stream except on one location where there is a Power-Lan that I have to plug off when I want to make music. With an external interface you are not automatically saved from disturbances, btw. USB can sometimes be tricky.
  
• I see not quite the benefit of a super good output quality compared to a very good one - just for the sake of hearing my own music in better quality than 99 % of my audience.
• It is true that the mic input is not really usable, so for the line input I have a cheap USB-Mixer.

Ofc this is my personal opinion as someone who was satisfied with 16 Bit/32khz sampling on my Casio FZ-1 Sampler more than 30 years ago.
The Laptop is now four years old and I do not know if current Latitudes still use that Realtek chip.
Btw, it cost me some digging and tweaking to get this office machine in the right direction, as in deactivating the page file and so on.

 

OK sure...you're deaf
But whatever works for you man..in the end, it's about what you need to get the job done and more importantly what the job actually is.

I hear you but USB interfaces with good drivers, microphone pre's, and headphone amps are relatively inexpensive and of exceptional quality in 2021, streets ahead of the old days.

Big thumbs up for Audient, they are fantastic.

I have the iD14 with the optical port that gives expandability of inputs should you need them. I run mine with 2 Apogee Ensembles in standalone mode that gives a total of 18 inputs.

The Audient is a USB interface and is fine. Mine is very stable. The Control program is really good and provides zero-latency input.

The big consideration is the AD conversion and drivers for Tracking. No onboard laptop headphone jack is going to give you decent AD Conversion with Phantom power or +4 operation. Usually, an external unit has a way better quality headphone amp as well. There is a considerable difference going into the laptop with any AD conversion. There are many very portable options out there using USB 3 and C in addition to thunderbolt ranging from minimum acceptable spec to super high fidelity.

I have a 2015 MacBook pro and it handles the audient (usually connected to my M1 mac mini) really well. I also have A Behringer XR18air that the band uses live and it handles that really well too (16 in Stereo out plus 4 balanced monitor sends out). I also have a small MAudio stereo USB that works well. I use various combinations of these for location sound on film shoots additional to my Tascam Hard disk recorder that also plugs in via USB.

Editing is another story. I have used my Bluetooth headphones on many occasions for stuff that I am editing however there is a slight perceivable delay for me so I plug my Maestro analog reference headphones straight into the headphone out.

A laptop gives you portability and flexibility. I would recommend an external interface as essential if you are tracking or interfacing with any monitoring system. The better known the brand the better the driver support. As I said, you can't go wrong with Audient

 

Last edited: Aug 22, 2021

Well, I would add an annoying fx that happens to me: at high volume with no audio input at earphones jack, and even more with an external amp, a
"zzzzzzzz---bip---bop---zzzzzzzz---bip---bop---zzzzzzzz---bip---bop---zzzzzzzz---bip---bop---zzzzzzzz---bip---bop"
that I guess related to the internals of laptop processes (hey Kraftwerk I can sell you this tech artist!).
For a bit more serious thing I use an ext. USB card.

 

It depends - do you need line inputs or is stereo out sufficient?
Apple Macs have very acceptable audio out quality plus an S-PDIF digital out, with Windows laptops it's much more a matter of hit and miss, audio quality can significantly change from model to model. I find recent Lenovo laptops quite good but I don't know others.

You can find a few custom measurements here though:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...of-pc-and-laptop-headphone-line-outputs.2386/

Oh and by the way, I cannot confirm that USB audio interfaces are necessarily better than what you get out of the laptop headphones port. Some are much worse (usually the cheaper ones, naturally ;)

 

Hey! those are good lirycs for a trap song

 

I remember I had to give away my M-Audio FastTrack Pro to a good friend of mine, just because they stopped updating its drivers at Windows 7. Later, somebody who knew how to build them shared online his own Windows 10 drivers for it. They work, but just for audio input/output. You lose the MIDI input/output connector functionality with those. So that you know...

My friend kept using it when he got Windows 10. But he needed MIDI input to record data from his MIDI drum kit and then play it on Addictive Drums. So he had to get an additional cheap MIDI In/Out interface and use them both at the same time.