Actually you need to factor in one other major thing:

The room you are recording in.

And that can be more expensive to fix than any electronic gear you're thinking of buying. Major studios spend millions to get their rooms constructed properly.... because it's a major component of the sound you're recording.

If you want to discuss AD/DA converters and such though that would take hundreds of pages. You might want to start subscribing to "Sound On Sound" magazine and look through their reviews on their website where they really go over components and get into all those techy details.

Personally, I've used an Echo Mia ($150) and now a Motu828mkII ($700) with great results. You would probably get great results with any of the units you've metioned with a decent mic and a good room. (IMHO - once you get past the Creative SBLive stage into any of the decent 24bit soundcards you can create a good recording.... the rest boils down to how many inputs and features you want in the interface.)

 

Thanks Tim.

It´s better if there´s not too much reverb in the room, isn´t it?

Do you know how to handle this problem?

 

Best low budget interface could be the EMU series sounds cards (1212m, 1820m, 1616m). They have the mastering-grade converters from the more expensive Digidesign series and sound awesome. The Saffire is great, too, but I'd stay away from the Mindprint Envoice (mixed reviews).

As timobrien has pointed out, there much more to a good sound quailty than the mic and sound card alone. Think about converters, preamps, clocking (often people forget about this), compression, and the room acoustics. Your recording will only be as good as the weakest link in your signal chain. Unless you have a great sounding room, you should record "dry" (in an ISO booth) and add reverb later in the DAW. This means that you'll need a kick *** reverb VST plugin, and they don't come cheap.

 

What do I need clocking for?

 

You need an external clock only if you have several digital devices working together and connected to your system.

But most propably you have just two devices. One acts as a master and the other as a slave. No clock needed.

By the way the soundcard is not so important to your final sound quality as you might think.

Once you get your sound recorded into your computer you of course keep it digital until you after making the final mastering mix write it on a cd and sit down and listen to enjoy the results of your efforts.
And then the sound quality is decided by your cd player/amplifier/loudspeakers.

The most important however is a location suitable for recording, a good microphone, a good mic preamp and good A to D converters, and experience using the above equipment.
And a good pair of ears.

Your soundcard is just for listening/monitoring to your work as your mixing manipulations go on.

The processing is done by the computer not your soundcard. Unless you happen to have one of these with onboard digital signal processing (DSP). That is, digital effects and virtual mixers etc. on soundcard.

It's open to discussion if there are any differences in the experienced subjective sound quality between the many audio recording programs available today.
Most important however for a home studio user is how the program routines work ("workflow") and how user friendly the software is.

rini

 

I have to respectfully disagree with you here, Rini. IMHO the sound card makes a huge difference. When I changed from an already good 24-bit sound card ($300.-) to an RME card, the improvement in sound quality was dramatic! The sound card is not just for listening/recording as you say: everything you every record will go through the chips of your sound card.

Also, clocking doesn't only refer to syncing two digital external devices. Even your recording/sequencing software can utilize a high-quality external clock which will improve the jitter from the sample rate inside your box and improve the lineup of the different audio samples/recordings, which translate into a better sound. The more samples and tracks you have, the more aparent the improvents when using a stable external clock.

All in all its important to have a balanced signal chain.

 

Thank you for your respectfulness, Giga.

In my reply above I said "Unless you happen to have one of these with onboard digital signal processing (DSP)".
The RME is a card with DSP.

The original question was about recording sax in a home studio environment.
So if your budget is tight you can do with a simple in/out card with good AD converters and get surprisingly good sound.

I believe what you say about the huge difference comparing your new system with the old one.
RME is famous for it's excellent sound, no doubt about it.
But it's already in semipro class, and you could sure start with a more simple and affordable solution.

The external clock wouldn't be on my shortlist for the most important devices I ought to have when building a home studio.

Well, we could discuss on this topic forever, but for those really interested to learn more of this, maybe a better forum would be one of those dedicated to audio. Like http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/index.php

Best regards,

rini

 

So if your budget is tight you can do with a simple in/out card with good AD converters and get surprisingly good sound.

I agree 100% with that.