What is the sound card with the best input that you know of?

Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.
Jump to Latest
W

wwenze

Member
Joined 2008
Ken Newton

Ken Newton

Member
Joined 2003
I've been wondering much the same thing. I'm looking for to set-up a sound card based audio spectrum analyzer to measure the performance of my various DIY DAC projects/experiments, and have been trying to determine if there is a clearly superior choice in a reasonably priced card, particularly regarding lowest THD+N on the A/D input.

I don't consider the nearly $700 Lynx L22 card reasonably priced. The best of come across so far seems to be the Asus Xonar Essence XT/XTS.
 
J

Johnny2Bad

Member
Joined 2010
Ken Newton said:
Out of curiosity, which specific RME card would you recommend for 2-channel audio spectrum analyzer applications and how much does it retail?
Click to expand...

I bought my Digi 9624 about 5 years ago ... cost me $700. That would be a great card if you could find it used (it's PCI only), perhaps at a price you could swallow (a quick Google shows one sale offer at 70 GBPounds), but broadly speaking any of the 24-bit 96Khz capable cards would work fine for your purposes; there's no need that I can see to go to a higher sampling rate for testing, at least. I've used mine for live recording and it also works very well for RTA with FuzzMeasure (OSX). RME has excellent support for Windows OS.

There's a review here of a similar card of the same generation:
RME Digi96/8 PAD computer soundcard | Stereophile.com

There are plenty of other reviews of the RME cards although they tend to be musician-centric and perhaps not as useful for your purposes as the Stereophile review and test data.

I'm not familiar with the current offerings ... I don't need anything better ;-) ... but a bit of research should get you a handle on which other models would work. I don't think you need to buy a new one unless the price is right for your wallet, performance hasn't been an issue for the generation I own or newer. The models that precede mine are 48 KHz units.

The thing I found when researching my purchase is that if you go by the published specifications, especially as you move toward "consumer" grade cards, whether intended for geeks or musicians, you will be in for some surprises as there are few that can actually meet them in real-world testing. Think of the spec sheet as a bill of materials, not a tested performance standard.
 
Last edited:
Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.
Top Bottom