Sound Card Advice

bipedalhumanoid

My needs are simple. I want to be able to record voice audio without the hissing noise in the background.

I don't care about gaming and I don't care about output sound quality. I only care about recording quality and even then I don't have great expectations. I just don't want a hissing sound in the background and I want people to be able to hear my voice without having to crank their sound up to 100%.

I have a good microphone but an obviously awful sound card because no matter how I set it to the recording quality is crap.

I'm willing to spend money on a high end gaming/studio quality sound card if necessary, but I would have thought my needs were a lot simpler than that!

Anyone have any recommendations?

indough

what about an emu sound card?

the 1212m pci-e card is good (also available as a straight up pci version)

you can get a breakout box for it as well which has great preamps (the same used in high end pro-tools systems)

bipedalhumanoid

After days of people at musical instrument & pc/electronics stores telling me the problem isn't the mic and is instead the sound card, I decided to shell out €7 on a dodgy little plastic mic to test the theory.

The dodgy little plastic mic works fine. The problem therefore isn't the sound card. It's the expensive, professional microphone I was using.
I think it might need a boost from a preamp. Anyone have any experience plugging ordinary handheld microphones (as opposed to cheap ones that come with web cams) into their sound cards?

Unregistered.

bipedalhumanoid wrote: »

After days of people at musical instrument & pc/electronics stores telling me the problem isn't the mic and is instead the sound card, I decided to shell out €7 on a dodgy little plastic mic to test the theory.

The dodgy little plastic mic works fine. The problem therefore isn't the sound card. It's the expensive, professional microphone I was using.
I think it might need a boost from a preamp. Anyone have any experience plugging ordinary handheld microphones (as opposed to cheap ones that come with web cams) into their sound cards?

What type of mic are you using?

mike65

Capacitor! thats the word I was rooting around for, if its a capacitor mic it need a pre-amp

indough

bipedalhumanoid wrote: »

After days of people at musical instrument & pc/electronics stores telling me the problem isn't the mic and is instead the sound card, I decided to shell out €7 on a dodgy little plastic mic to test the theory.

The dodgy little plastic mic works fine. The problem therefore isn't the sound card. It's the expensive, professional microphone I was using.
I think it might need a boost from a preamp. Anyone have any experience plugging ordinary handheld microphones (as opposed to cheap ones that come with web cams) into their sound cards?

what exact microphone is it? you could try a usb preamp. they are available on thomann or musicstore.de

bipedalhumanoid

indough wrote: »

what exact microphone is it? you could try a usb preamp. they are available on thomann or musicstore.de

Tx – 8
Type moving coil dynamic
Freq response 50 to 16000Hz
Output level at 1000hz : circuit voltage -75Db
Impedence: Rated Impedance is 600 ohms for connection to microphone inputs rated low z

indough

this one is supposed to be very good i researched it a while back, maybe you could find it cheaper elsewhere

http://www.thomann.de/ie/centrance_micport_pro.htm

heres the product page with more details

http://www.centrance.com/products/mp/

Fresz19

Creative X-Fi Audio - good for everything - cost 50 euro

Solitaire

No...

And €50 is way too much to pay for that PoS anyway...

indough

its nowhere near good enough for a proper recording