This is one of the most asked questions by my students and peers in the Sound
Engineering community. I would like to make the distinction at the start between the
three types of studios, namely, ‘
Home Studio’, ‘
Project Studio’ and the ‘
Professional Studio’.
Most of my students and
music hobbyists would fall into the Home Studio category. At its most basic and at the heart of any good studio would be your PC. This should be a dedicated machine only for Music Production and only loaded with music production software. This will not only help your machine perform better; but also have a lighter load to carry and the only files that get loaded on and pulled off are audio related (WAV., MP3…).This really does work in maintaining the performance of your machine. If you should have any problems there after; it allows you to pinpoint the problematic program or plugins.
Home Studio hobbyists should take care as they are most likely to overspend or under-spend as they don’t have specific requirements; that dictate what they eventually will
buy. A good rule within
Sound Engineering is “all input is directly proportional to output.” Basically purchasing gear will never end but you can ensure that you make the right choices and will always be happy if you plan your buy. Industry name brands are just that, brands that have earned their reputation, over a number of years and mean that much to the people who use them and most definitely, in most cases, have earned their pricing. This is what we as
Headroom Productions have come to understand with pricing and it works this way most of the time.
Let’s start by looking at
sound cards for home studio use.
I find it best to ask at least five questions in order to pinpoint the roles that any piece of equipment will need to fill. These are questions that I use and you can tailor make your own to better fulfill your needs. Try to do your best when answering as this will greatly affect your choice and the amount of time and money you will have to spend on selecting your goods.
Question 1:
What am I going to use it for? (Write as many uses as you have)
(This will help determine the number of inputs and outputs you will need)
Question 2:
How much do I have to spend? Bottom end (R500-1500); Mid-range (R1500-R5000); High end (R5000-/+R15000).
Don’t feel if you choose low end that it won’t sound good because there are so many different well-priced options out there that will give you what you want.
Question 3: Will there be need for a change in a relatively short time of a year?This may help justify spending more now the first time around as opposed to forking out even more cash later.
Question 4:
Does the sound card support ASIO drivers? (
Audio streaming input/output.)
ASIO is one of the best interfaces between an application and the sound card. It gives
us a way to use multiple inputs and outputs together, quite effortlessly. Does this card have a good
A to D converters? (
Analogue to Digital) because what we are recording or capturing is an analogue sound and it is stored to a digital medium - the hard drive of your PC. The quality of the converters really affects the sound of the recording.
Question 5:
What should I be looking for with regard to sample rate and bit depth?A good rule of thumb would be the higher the sample rate and bit depth, the better.
The higher the sample rate you have, the better the recording is physically represented.
Audio is therefore more accurately heard and captured, keeping in mind that CD quality is 44.1 kHz at 16bit.
Two of my most recent
sound cards/audio interfaces that I had the pleasure of
testing courtesy of
Marshall Music :
The ALESIS MultiMix 8USB PROFESSIONAL ALL-IN-ONE MIXER AND AUDIO INTERFACE. This would fall into the mid-price range; it has four Microphone
preamplifiers with phantom power. It has a USB connection which connects to your PC and comes with Cubase LE. On listening to the
Alesis Multimix I can say very openly that it has a very warm and clean sound and would be perfect for the home studio hobbyist looking to do more high-end work. The down side is that it needs external powering and only comes with Cubase LE and at times, you start to feel like you are limited with
Steinberg and
Cubase LE however, there's always the option to upgrade to
Cubase 4.
For more information about training on Cubase in South Africa,
Damelin Bramley is a certified
Steinberg training center .
The other system is the
Protools Mbox which is much smaller than the Alesis and only has two microphone preamplifiers, both with phantom power it doesn’t have all the buttons and knobs that some of the other units have ,but it does carry the name of Protools with and it definitely has that clean well-rounded dynamic range that we have come to expect from
Digi Design. It comes with Protools LE which seems a lot more comprehensive than most of the other LE ranges out there. It is fully USB powered and is very portable.
There are many other types of sound card/interfaces available, however the Protools Mbox and Alesis MultiMix, in my opinion, would be the best value for money. They yield an above-average sound and they do not need to make use of any external gear such as a
mixing desk.
The Signal chain starts with a good microphone and is then transferred to the MIC input, known as a microphone preamplifier found on (
mixing desks and
sound cards with built in preamplifiers.)
These along with the A/D converters is what pushes up the prices of most mixing desks, these two sound cards like most of the new age cards (
audio interfaces) make use of built in preamplifiers and A/D converters, making them cheaper than a mixing desk but able to deliver
high quality audio.
Your audio sequencer
Cubase/Protools, or what ever sequencer it is servers a few rolls one to facilitate the recording, or provide a stable environment in which to run (V.S.T.I’S) virtual studio technology instruments. Used for making music with
MIDI, (musical instrument digital interface), this name is not as flattering as the music itself that MIDI manages to produce. The other function audio sequencers are used for is arranging, editing and mixing.
I should also make people aware that Protools has for a very long time, only been available to high-end professional studios. As their high-end systems (TDM(Time-division multiplexing) and HD) are hardware based systems, that do all the number crunching, taking away a great deal of strain from the machine and allowing the O.S (operating system) to function more rapidly. The hardware that a Protools system incorporate works as a copy protection device, preventing piracy both, in their TDM /HD systems as well as their LE systems. A Protools LE system does a lot less number crunching and comes in a lot cheaper, than the TDM/HD systems. Protools has a wide LE range (The Protools Mbox, Digi 002 and now the Digi 003) that is highly recommended for further investigation.
It is held annually at the Sandton convention center I have been attending the convention as a sound engineer for the last four years, and have always love to see the new toys that and out there in the field of Media Broadcast. Most of my sound engineering students from damelin have and continue to attend mediatech and it’s great for caching up with people from the industry and networking with suppliers.To have a look at a few things you should have seen at Mediatech have a look at Mediatech Toys for Sound Engineers.For more about Mediatech go to.
