External USB Sound Cards

Anyone here use external usb sound cards? such as if you're a laptop user? I'm looking for more info about them as I want to get one for my laptop (the onboard sound chip is crap).

 

Rich or Poor?
Rich: FA-101
Poor: Indigo

Some solid reviews from em411, I'd trust them. If you're gigging and you don't want to sound like shit, get the roland. If you just need to listen to a little music at work or while you're studying, get the indigo.

 

I was looking more at something like this: http://www.google.dealtime.co.uk/xKW-psc805/NS-1/linkin_id-3035463/GS.html

 

Well, what do you need it for? Do you carry your laptop around? I'm thinking that the philips would be fine if you just leave your laptop at home. The roland would be better for audio production, but the philips is fine for user stuff. It has surround sound too, which is nice.

 

The laptop is always at home... anytime that I do take it out, last thing I want to do is waste power by using audio...

I've pretty much made up my mind to go for the Philips. It seems to do everything I want it to do, and it looks cool too (something else to show off to my friends )

 

there is the creative labs extigey, and MAYA has some decent ones too

 

ah the extigy... good and bad, but bad outweighs good which is why I don't use mine anymore

this thing mixes in 5.1, right? you hit a magic button and stereo sound will be mixed and sent to all of your speakers, neat

ok here's the bad
1. the extigy uses usb 1.1... or 1.0, whichever it is, it's not 2... and for as many bits and bytes and whatnots flowing through your wires of information, it's pretty slow

think about it, you hit a button on your keyboard, it sends a request to your computer, which routes the request to your synth which in this case is your EXTIGY, which has create, mix, and replay the sound... all through a slow, usb connection.. firewire or usb 2.0 would be nice

2. NO ASIO
for those of you who don't know what asio is don't worry about it mang!
but if you'd like to play a tune on your keyboard, or record without adjusting the playtime mentally by 7 or so seconds (hit a key... wait 7 seconds, hear the sound) you NEED an asio driver

 

I went for the Aurillium in the end... and I'm highly impressed... It just works, you know? no need to piss about with anything, just plug it in, install the drivers, and you're ready to go.. I've had mine for a couple of weeks now, but have been using it for the past week, and it's great.

 

you can try the mbox
It's a semi-pro system that has many options...

http://www.digidesign.com/products/mbox/basics/

 

Hey Mr Peanut - you should check out Asio4All (http://michael.tippach.bei.t-online.de/asio4all/) i use it with my SB Live card and its pretty sound. I'm getting latency of less than 10ms with a 1Ghz Duron and SB Live.