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Buying some recording gear...

B

bobsaget

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jan 24, 2004
Messages
4,403
I want to get some better sounding recording than my current 10 dollar piece of junk microphone.

I'm pretty dead-set on the Shure SM57 Mic. It seems to be perfect for what I want.



Getting the right soundcard for this job is where I need help from you guys.



I have been looking at the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI card.

The M-audio 1010LT is way out of my price range as I want to keep the total for the mic/card under 200 bucks.



Here are my questions:

1. What soundcard would you recommend?
2. How do I go about hooking up an XLR mic to an RCA Input on a sound card? Just a simple adapter? Is there a loss in sound quality by doing this?



Thanks.
 
Mic level signal is very weak, you would have to run through a mic pre-amp to get to line level, or run into a Mic in on your soundcard(probably low quality unless its a nice card), What are you using the equipment for, perhaps you should look at a mixer. Mackies are relatively affordable and good quality for the price, nice preamps.
 
I think with this kind of budget you'll end up with a decent mic (sm57s are nice, especially for vocals) and a soundcard unsuited to the purpose. Edirol makes some USB based boxes that have 2 xlr/trs inputs, phantom power for them, and 24/96 support. The ua-5 and ua-25 are both about $250-280 depending where you get them. I have no experience with drivers on these, but with the ua-1000 I get 3ms latency and no dropouts or glitches of any sort. And that's over usb2.

Basically, a $200 interface will take you much further than a $100 interface, but if your budget is limited, the m-audio is the way to go. An external interface will have lower noise, but cost more.

The only problem with unbalancing the XLR signal is it'll make the signal more prone to noise from then on. It shouldn't be a huge problem. Also, if you want to run phantom power (for a condenser mic, the sm57 isn't) you'll need some other power source. Good choices overall, but if you can stretch the budget it'd be a good thing.
 
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