sound card role in audio editing vs onboard

[Blinkybill]

hello.

im a kind of noob when it comes to audio hardware and ive been playing around with cubase for a year now.

im still using my onboard audio (maximus iii formula) connected to amp via optical spdif,

i will soon be upgrading to a haswell system so i figured i will buy a sound card as well.

so ive been around some articles that says most sound cards doesn't offer any improvement over onboard solutions and its basicly the same hardware (sometimes even worse) as the onboard.

 

i wanted to know if its true to production of music as well.

because now when i create more then 30 channels on cubase with multiple plugins and filters i get choppy sound when i hit play and lots of skips, and the vst performance meter shows it full.

also i understand that better sound card offers less latency, now i have around 41ms and from what i read i need about 8.

 

so im kinda lost. should i buy a sound card? maybe external one? i dont have a big budget as im buying a new pc as well..

is the processor a bigger concern when it comes to the performance of cubase?

maybe you can shed some light on the subject because i don't seem to fully understand what is the role of the sound card when it comes editing sounds..

[wpirobotbuilder]

If you're very serious about music production, consider investing in a card from Universal Audio, here. They offload most of the audio processing to the dedicated PCI-E card, while a sound card (or onboard audio) is used for playback

 

They can get expensive, but are invaluable for professional music production.

[chicksoup]

external would be good, but the issue with it becoming choppy is the CPU, MOBO and RAM rather than the audio card, because they have to combine all the channels and send it to the audio card to convert to analog 

[ShearMe]

external would be good, but the issue with it becoming choppy is the CPU, MOBO and RAM rather than the audio card, because they have to combine all the channels and send it to the audio card to convert to analog

This. Dedicated audio hardware makes no difference for music production. It's only in recording and playback where you have to know what your hardware does and why you need it and not something else.

[chicksoup]

This. Dedicated audio hardware makes no difference for music production. It's only in recording and playback where you have to know what your hardware does and why you need it and not something else.

that's not what I said, I said it's rather his PC that is causing the choppy playback rather than the audio card

[ShearMe]

that's not what I said, I said it's rather his PC that is causing the choppy playback rather than the audio card

 

I know that's not what you said - that's why I said it.

[mr moose]

You shouldn't need major hardware for sound editing, I was editing multiple tracks (10 or so) and running upto 15 VST plug-ins on a 3 core phenom with 4g ram using a usb creative live sound solution and never experienced an issue.  You are however right, low latency is necessary for best results (especially when recording) although usually the rest of system doesn't have to be anything special as audio signals are not especially taxing on system resources.

 

What hardware are you currently running? It would be wise to determine what is causing the stuttering before lashing out on what could easily be an unnecessary sound card as sound cards rarely do any processing other than eax and a handful of pre-programmed eq/effects.