Hello im new here, ive been learning to produce tech trance music for over a year on ableton. But years ago i bought a sound card (Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro) for the sole purpose of gaming. Im on a PC and sometimes i have trouble mixing with this card, the sound just doesnt sound natural, lack of bass and midrange, i find that i need to adjust the eq settings on the card software alot to get it to sound "normal". Which screws up my mixing. I have a laptop that i also mix on and they come out much better than the ones i create on my desktop because the sound is more balanced. But i would rather use my desktop to mix on, its more powerful and bigger monitor.

So my confusion comes in when looking for a new sound card. I dont record anything off mics, or have any guitars etc.
I only use speakers and headphones at the moment with 3.5mm jacks, will i be able to connect them on something like this? http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5586744&CatId=4491 i dont know what any of those connections are for.
what kind of cards can i get (any price range) that will give me that rich sound that my current sound card lacks, and also give me less latency?

 

if your not hooking anything into your soundcard, you don't need all those connections.. best to get one of the External boxed M-Audio USB cards for the same price.... or a little more...

Remember, u get what u pay for.

example 149$

IMO.

 

hey One Reason thanks for pointing me in the right direction *yes* i will do a little more research on these external usb cards and might get one soon

 

great! thanks i will give these a look and figure out which one i get

 

Ah, correct me if im wrong but i use asio4all on my laptop and when im working with ableton i can only hear the sound that comes out of ableton, i have to disable asio4all if i want to listen music on windows media player or watch a youtube video. It works well with my latency issues but the downside is that i must disable it if i want to do anything else besides work in ableton. One scenario is watching a video tutorial on lets say synthesis while following that videos instructions with ableton, it just can't happen, i can't do both with asio4all. Doesn't the card have a better driver you can download from their website instead of asio4all? i would prefer not to use asio4all on my desktop *no*

 

If you are not in recording of mic or any live instrument you do not have to worry about latency! About “rich” sound -> make sure that all sound enhancements are off on your laptop. I don’t think that you will get any noticeable improvements with any other sound card, especially not in price range $150. Major mistake which you are making is that you can’t make a quality sound, which sounds everywhere the same, on headphones or classic speakers. You have to use special kind of speakers so called “monitors”.

 

Im talking about the latency in ableton, in the preferences under audio, its using my audio cards asio drivers, buffer size 880 samples, and overall latency of 12.2ms which is pretty good but i have to set driver error compensation down to -30ms. Yea im still saving up for some good monitors. Im still hoping that i will get better audio from a new card because my current one was made for gaming, which it does well, but not so much for mixing. It has all these enhancements which i always have turned off but it still sounds like it lacks something. But um ill see how much i can save up for a new sound card, looking online for good deals ive found the M-audio fast track pro for $149 on ebay.

 

im still using an EMU 1820m,it has worked fine for years,low latency,onboard effects etc, i wont upgrade till it blows up

 

UAD thats all i use , its the best for terms of quality and power , it doesent use the computers cpu , it basically has its own cpu And it has the best plugin set , and it auto updates its pluggins , having said that i dont do much recording "live" but when i do i use a saffire 6 with reason record that has no latency issues with its asio drivers.

both are reasonable prices aswell