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Originally posted by ClearWater I've always been sick of sitting in front of a PC. Trying to do stuff on my now ancient IBM R41. I can only deal with one track but thats enough to work on a 'drum kit' type deal with sound fx, short loops and so forth. What makes a laptop soundcard inferior to something professional? Which I'd still use of course for the full mix of the track. Now as I was writing this I realized that its really the CPU and software doing all the calculations yes? The sound card is ONLY for outputting to your monitors so you know what your getting? Therefore the sound quality should be identical, just represented differently based on your choice of monitors? I'm working with instruments I had already sampled and recorded on the PC so I'm not recording anything original from the laptop itself.

don't forget the inputs

A professional sound card has a lot of benefits over laptop audio. The most important one is the quality of the sound you are hearing. Laptops usually have 16 bit digital to audio conversion, with a lot of distortion (poor grounding, interference, etc.) and a low signal to noise ratio. If you buy a professional card, the sound out of your DAW will be more faithfully recreated. It obviously won't change the sound quality of the recording itself, but it will help you to mix better, etc.

Ancillary benefits are better stability, lower latency, lower CPU utilisation and so on.

While we`re on this subject.

Are there any cards that works in the express slot that could be worth using ?

I can find one card for this:

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Notebook

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Echo have the Indigo expresscards, but they are fairly simple.

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Originally posted by echosystm Echo have the Indigo expresscards, but they are fairly simple.

Yeah something that would provide a decent asio driver, so i could drag only the laptop around without that external stuff.

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Originally posted by echosystm Echo have the Indigo expresscards, but they are fairly simple.

They look pretty fantastic, although they only have the 1/8th in output. I suppose its the IO I would choose over the DJx version.

I have the PCMCIA version of the indigo DJ. Its good. Sound quality is nice and crisp, very few bugs, can get good latency. I think its a reasonably good buy for what it is.

Laptop sound card is fine for monitoring (not recording) if your starting out. But you'll get a lot of benefits from using an external soundcard, mainly better quality and lower latency. A good soundcard reduces your CPU usage so you can run more tracks.

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when the term recording is used you mean from an outside source? Internal rendering of something you put together with a synth or samples should render without defect?