Audio Interface Recommendation

acid1011 · June 16, 2018

I'm currently using a pair of JBL LSR305 with my pc.
It's connected with the motherboard 3.5 mm output. The mobo is Asus ROG Strix z370f.
Is it enough to utilize the full potential of the speakers?
Will getting a dedicated external DAC or a Pre Amp improve the sound quality by much?

Also , i'm about to get an audio interface so that i can plug in my guitar to the pc for using with Guitar Rig 5.
As far as i know, audio interfaces also have built in DACs?are those better than the on board sound cards of motherboards?
I have a budget of about 100-150$ for that. which audio interface would be better in this range? M-audio/ Focusrite Solo/ Presonus are the only stuff available where i live.

P.S. i'm quite noob when comes to audio stuff,so any advice would be much appreciated.

4 Fawkes Ache · June 16, 2018

4 hours ago, acid1011 said:

I'm currently using a pair of JBL LSR305 with my pc.
It's connected with the motherboard 3.5 mm output. The mobo is Asus ROG Strix z370f.
-Is it enough to utilize the full potential of the speakers?
-Will getting a dedicated external DAC or a Pre Amp improve the sound quality by much?

Also , i'm about to get an audio interface so that i can plug in my guitar to the pc for using with Guitar Rig 5.
-As far as i know, audio interfaces also have built in DACs?

-are those better than the on board sound cards of motherboards?
I have a budget of about 100-150$ for that. which audio interface would be better in this range? M-audio/ Focusrite Solo/ Presonus are the only stuff available where i live.

P.S. i'm quite noob when comes to audio stuff,so any advice would be much appreciated.

-If the marketing blurb for that motherboard is real than yes, it is enough.

-dedicated external: unless you have basically a perfect ear (like, you can tell when a piano is2 hertz off-key) you're probably not gonna hear a difference whatsoever.

-they do, otherwise you wouldn't be able to hear anything (DAC = Digital to Analogue Converter, interfaces also have an ADC Analogue to Digital Converter)

-nowadays not so much, since they've been working on isolating the sound signals from interference as much as possible and they've gotten a lot better to begin with.

Sound is a waveform, to digitize that waveform they check the height of the wave and the more often you do that the more accurate it becomes and the higher the max frequency gets. That is sampling frequency, the 44.1 kHz. (or 48, 96 or whatever you use). And because sound is a wave, the highest frequency you can produce is half of the sampling frequency. Remember: even under perfect conditions humans can not hear above 22 kHz. If you live in a large city and are over 30, you're lucky if you can hear above 18 kHz, above 50 that's 15 kHz.

But what about bits? That's the other "dimension" sound is recorded in. More bits is more levels between soft and loud. So even at 4 bits, you can recognize what the song is, but there is a loud hiss, because the groundnoise is just 4 levels under the loudest sound.

So recording studios love to record at 24 bits 96 kHz because it gives them a lot of room to play with sound and keep the groundnoise level out of the equation.