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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: Is a Good External Sound Card Necessary

This topic is old and might contain outdated or incorrect information.

Hey, I am new to the game, and doing my first gig on friday. I currently have the one month trial to Virtual DJ, but plan to upgrade when the time comes....
My current set up is:
Hercules Steel
and an extremely cheap external sound card for cueing (http://www.amazon.com/External-Channel-Sound-Adapter-Notebook/dp/B000N35A0Y/ref=pd_cp_e_2_img)

Should I buy a new sound card, will it improve sound quality that much? Or is the built in mac sound card good enough?

Thanks a lot for the help
 
Posted Thu 18 Nov 10 @ 1:11 am
You normally need an external soundcard for to be able to cue with headphones while playing a different track out of the master outputs.
 
congratulations on your gig

i say get a soundcard with more than 2 channels and the best you can afford

the improvement in the sound is very noticeable and you can have a very loud headphone

that isn't distorted

the card in your link isn't much of a card you know .....

also you do have to tell windows or mac to use it as the sound device .....

real soundcards aren't gamer cards

real soundcards cost at least 200$

some will dispute that because they have mediocre cards they like that cost 100 or 120$ but still ......

real cards cost 200 and up ....why don't you take the proceeds $ from this gig and get a real card ?

make 'em pay 100% in advance is a good payment policy and you never get burned for money.....

then take the money and get the card
 
Thanks for the quick responses.
I didn't realize a good external makes that big a difference, I was just using my shitty external to cue up,
and playing the speaker music straight from my computer.

I just started looking over some cards, but am a bit overwhelmed, which is a good purchase for under $200?
Is the Audio 4 DJ good? (http://www.amazon.com/Native-Instruments-AUDIO-Interface-sup1/dp/B001RNUBV2/ref=sr_1_1?s=musical-instruments&ie=UTF8&qid=1290096475&sr=1-1)


Is there that big a difference if I spend under $100 for one? For example the Audio 2 DJ
(http://www.amazon.com/Native-Instruments-instruments-Audio-interface/dp/B002LG808K)
 
 
Get this and don't look back. This will allow you to use 4 players and they each can be on a separate channel.
 
I use this one 5 days a week. $34 and works great. I just use the headphone out on my computer to cue. Had two gigaports go bad on me within two months of each other. when the first went bad I bought one of these as a backup and now I have 4 (2 for my main system and 2 for my back-up/ceremony system. The first one I bought over two years ago is still the one that I use regularly. No need to get all fancy, this really does the trick:)

http://www.pssl.com/Behringer-UCA-202-2-IO-USB-Audio-Interface
 


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