External is definitely better. We use an external ESI U24 for our acoustical measurements. The noise floor is much lower this way--even on a battery operated laptop. I'm not familiar with the one you mentioned, but I would expect it would be superior to an internal. The only other option is that some PCs have SPDIF output--then you could go to a good D/A. I have not done this latter one myself, so there could be some configuration issues (such as sample rate and bit depth), but perhaps other a-goners have done this and can comment on it.
External sound device vs PCI soundcard
Hi all
I’m still feeling my way around the area of PC audio, so please don’t shoot me if I’m way off track.
After reading through many of the post on this site is seems the general consensus is that doing a D-A conversion inside to PC case degrades sound quality to much due to electrical interference.
One way I thought of getting past this problem was to use an external sound device like the M-audio Sonic Theater, USB. If the sensitive DAC process was kept away from the PC, wouldn’t the output signal be relatively good.
Any thought or experience with external sound devices vs. internal soundcard would be greatly welcome.
Cheers.
I’m still feeling my way around the area of PC audio, so please don’t shoot me if I’m way off track.
After reading through many of the post on this site is seems the general consensus is that doing a D-A conversion inside to PC case degrades sound quality to much due to electrical interference.
One way I thought of getting past this problem was to use an external sound device like the M-audio Sonic Theater, USB. If the sensitive DAC process was kept away from the PC, wouldn’t the output signal be relatively good.
Any thought or experience with external sound devices vs. internal soundcard would be greatly welcome.
Cheers.