Part 2
Hello friends,
Today I going to talk about audio interface. Audio interface is an essential equipment for any studio, and I will suggest a few good devices that fit even a low budget and return a high-quality result. I must apologize in advance, I must use some specific terminology this time, but promise to keep it at minimum and provide simple analogies for a best understanding.
Audio interface is a device that directly affects quality and comfort of your work.
What is an audio interface? It is a device equipped with an analog to digital and digital to analog converters. These converters help us to record sound from microphones and music instruments to computer and transfer sound from computer to an external device, such as headphones and speakers. In fact, quality of these converters directly influences quality of the final sound.
The other important factor you must consider before buying an audio interface are drivers (ASIO system). How do they work? All processes within your computer take time. With the modern computer systems, we might not even notice it, because modern processors are very fast and capable of handling complex tasks. However, when we run complex applications that use a lot of resources, we can experience certain lags and delays.
Working with digital audio, real-time digital synthesis, emulation of various analog devices in a digital environment, all these are quite resource-intensive processes and some of them can really slow down and even overload and freeze your computer. To get a better idea how it works imaging this: You press the piano key, but the sound begins not right away, but with the delay of a dozen milliseconds. If you ever played any music instruments you would understand an absurdness of this situation.
ASIO system partially created to compensate such a delays and to mitigate discomfort during real-time playing.
That is all we need to know right now, unless you decide to capture a symphonic orchestra at your very first session! Hope it is not the case.
Typically, audio cards are equipped with a certain number of analog inputs, which allows you to connect, for an example, a microphone, guitar, or other sound source. They also equipped with one or more outputs for an acoustic monitoring system and one or more outputs for headphones. All these interfaces are connected via USB and are easily recognized by your computer as a new device, which we will later select in our work programs.
Let us look at some of the audio interfaces.
I currently work with the previous version of this interface and never had any problem. Good converters and pre-amplifiers as well as a great price make this interface a very good deal.
The next generation of audio interfaces from the legendary Steinberg! Steinberg was originally behind the Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) system, so there should not be any problem using their hardware.
Inexpensive and high-quality version of the audio interface. Unfortunately, I have not tested it in real conditions, but the rest of the products by this company assures a high quality.
Any of the above would work just fine. Trust me, this level of interfaces is enough for a great start. And do not forget, a brilliant idea in music can be realized on basic equipment. Without ideas, even a super-professional studio that worth a millions of dollars will not help!
In the next post I will talk about monitoring (monitor speakers, headphones) and suggest good budget options and explain how to use it.
Stay tuned…
Andru “Namaste” Shaitar
webdisweb@gmail.com
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