Sound Cards


I'm a very picky audiophile and was stunned by a question my wife posed to me while cleaning the basement. She pointed to my old Crown CX744 10 inch reel to reel and said why don't you get ride of that thing since you never play it anyway? All you have to do is transfer your one of a kind recordings to CD. Well she just put me into the computer sound card world with a great idea. I was informed by young students at my university that I wanted to rip music. Well all of a sudden I'm part of the MPEG III crowd. Does anyone have a suggestion as to the right sound card (and software) to take an analoge stereo source and convert it to a CDROM? I'd like full 16/44.1K sampling, not MPEG III. I don't care about CD to CD transfers.
keis
For consumer markets, the soundblaster live is a good choice. I have one in my pc, and it produces fairly good sound. I run it into a set of prologic decoding sony speakers. It's pretty good sounding. The soundblaster has two large advantages. A) relatively low cost (around 200 1 year ago) B) it's the compatibility standard. C) It can output digital. You can run it into the input of a good quality DAC and get some good sound. I have not done this.
look at what ARDVARK has to offer for the pc -- approx 700 though. or just buy an Alesis master link and record at 24/96 and save to aiff from the drive for later. Consider burning a 44k/20bit cd in the mean time. Machine is about 2 grand. www.alesis.com
This is slightly on topic - I'd like to make a cable to go from the soundcard (1/8 stereo mini) on my computer to my bedroom stereo (RCA in). What are the best steps to take? Connectors, cable type/gage, shileding configuration? Thanks, Shawn
You should go to Radio Shack and tell them what you want to do. They sell a nice variety of cable converters and cable signal amplifiers. They helped me run long cables for my satellite dish. The results are good, and it was reasonably priced. They have one really cool product that actually converts your video signal to RF, then tranmits to an UNCONNECTED video receiver at another location. They might make the same thing for audio. Quality is tbd!