(advice?) I'm contemplating on building a new PC

It looks like all the bases are pretty well covered, but there are a couple of things that I would recommend. If you are doing really heavy mixing/editing, you might want to look into getting three hard drives: one for the OS and applications; two in a RAID array (striped for performance or mirrored for protection) for the swap file, temp directories and file storage.

Regarding the floppy drive, you never know when you will need one so it doesn't really hurt to have one. What you might want to consider is one of the combo media drives. These are the drives that only take up a floppy disk bay, but have a floppy disk slot and various media card readers (i.e. CF, SD and MS). This is the one that I use and I have been very happy with it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16821104104

 

Got to disagree with this, also with your recommendation of an Audigy 2. If you're going to be monitoring any kind of audio you need a nice quality output, on-board won't cut it. Also, if you're gaming and using onboard sound, it's only a codec so all the processing gets done by the CPU, which is obviously bad for CPU-intensive games (and for audio work, the latency will be crap too).

An Audigy 2 will be fine for gaming, but if you're into audio then I'd stear clear - I've got an Audigy 2 ZS Pro Platinum, and while it's fine for games, movies etc there are more suitable cards if you're working seriously with audio. I paid more than it was worth and could've got a better card for less. Also, Creative's drivers are some of the most bloated I've ever seen, and I've heard they deliberately break standards because they want to make their competitors have to engineer workarounds. That's not the kind of behaviour I like to support.

 

I will eventually be using another soundcard in the long run, so that doesn't matter to me at the moment. I'll buy another M-Audio Delta 1010 which is more than sufficient enough quality wise to record/mix/and master.

 

My last experiences with M-Audio cards were dreadful, almost new and getting serious crackling on the pots, then an external soundcard that wouldn't detect (and eventually had to be sent back). Apparently they're pretty decent generally, though.

Also madhatter, since I forgot: Protools|HD setups do require external DSPs Bloody expensive too.

 

I never had any issues with my card in my 4 years of recording:020: . The only thing that ever gave me issues was the power of my PC. Try recording 8 tracks at the same time at 48khz/32bit on an 800mhz computer. That's lol's town:katamari: .

 

What were you recording that needed 32-bit rather than 16? Don't get me wrong, generally I record into 32-bit, but if you're doing 8 tracks in most cases it would be kind of unnecessary.

Not to say that an 800mhz CPU could cope with it anyway (probably as much to do with ATA-33/66 bandwidth/write issues etc, as processor power though, I would've thought).

 

Good to know. My last sound card was a Creative SB Live! and I wasn't very impressed - in fact, the N-force2 chip on the next motherboard I bought sounded clearer and suffered less resource-based issues. The drivers are indeed very bloated. I picked the Audigy2 because I figured it was the better choice over onboard sound, but that might not be the case ultimately!

Sound cards should definitely be your personal choice toubabokoomi

From using sequencers I know that a SB16 doesn't quite cut it due to a lack of channels. Also not all onboard sound fully utilises Direct-X and can cause compatibility issues with some software.

Also guys, bear in mind the budget. He wants to aim for $700 on the system, presumably $1k tops with the monitor included.

 

I'd record at 32 bit because it gave a bit more headroom. Not to mention it's always better to record at 32 bit then dither to 16. I know it's a small difference, but I always tried to get the best out of what I had.

I recorded bands, did editing and mastering.

It was a damn successful business. I have 2 national releases. Granted, they’re both death metal bands, but it's still something to show! I was the cheapest in town, $10 an hour. I was too darn generous.

 

I've only recommended an Audigy 2 card if he is into gaming. It is a gaming sound card, not a $100+ midi input card. Only audio mixing I ever did was with MTV Music Generator PC version. Used a Pentium Pro that had an ISA Sound Blaster 16 and midi input thru the keyboard was just grand back then.

Taucias, the onboard nForce2 APU was much more superb than the Live!, and even Audigy cards because it literally had its own APU and did encode to Dolby 5.1 (or something like that I don't quite remember) and was much more recommended if you were going to build a HTPC. Sucks that creative squashed it and nVidia no longer used it in their newer chipsets.

 

Um, what? I doubt it had a decent signal/noise ratio on its inputs (for one, mobo noise in the DAC is pretty much unavoidable past a certain level) and I'm certain it would not held a candle to a decent card; aside from any chip-based benefits, it wouldn't have the various inputs and preamps, for one thing. So the Nforce 2 on-board chip has a dedicated processor - like every real sound card on the market, including the Live! and Audigy cards (did you mean to imply they don't have a processor on board)? A step in the right direction for sure, but the fact of the matter is it was designed from the ground up to be as low-cost as possible and will be a poor replacement for a real sound card.

I realise this is getting well off-topic now, but on-board sound is no replacement for a real sound card if you're doing serious audio work. Even if you're not, I'm highly suspicious that it'd be superior to a dedicated card.

Well, an Audigy 2 will by default be better than any on-board solution (that I've ever worked with, anyway), but yeah, I had an OEM SB Live! and it never worked properly. The Live! series had serious flaws, almost entirely caused by terrible driver support. A friend of mine had one which worked an absolute dream - crystal clear recording, exceptionally low latency etc. He had bought the retail version with the live drive. Deduce from that what you will.

You say that it sounded clearer - I wouldn't be surprised if that was the result of some kind of nasty automatic noise removal. Typically this would result in slightly tinny high-end and poor bass response above sub-level. It may well sound clearer, but you aren't actually hearing the true audio. Worthless for audio work.

SB16 has been obsolete for over a decade, to be honest. The cheapest on-board audio solutions simply emulate it, because it's still an accepted standard.

Sounds good - any names I'd know?