Hello fellow Musicians.

I've had quite a layoff from music, but I am trying to get back into it, because I miss it to be frank.

As the title of my post states, I have decided to go down the laptop route, rather than, a naturally more powerful, desktop route. My old desktop was just struggling with Sonar 6 and Absynth 5, my weapons of choice, so I had to upgrade.

I didn't fancy being stuck in my room this time, hence the main reason why I have chosen a laptop.

The laptop I have chosen is a custom built affair from a company called pcspecialist. They are not generally known as being builders of music computers, but I just thought that, for the spec I wanted, the professionals wanted too much for their efforts. Yes, I admit that I would now have a fully functioning laptop, without having the need of pestering people on forums, for help on all sorts of stuff. But that is part of the fun for me. I've always been one for meddling with my own computer hardware.

Anyway, I'll be brief about the laptop spec, and I'll just say that it is a high end gaming laptop. I went for an i7 processor, it's got 16gb RAM, and two reasonable sized solid state drives. Needless to say, it flies.

However, and as I fully expected, the on board sound card is somewhat lacking, being a Realtek device. Don't get me wrong, it is a worthy device, for what it is, but it struggles with the likes of Sonar and Absynth.

I now need to do my homework, before I get back into music fully, but I thought I would ask around here too. I now need an external soundcard. I'm thinking of Tascam, M-Audio, Roland, that sort of stuff. I do not necessarily need an input device as I have a Roland mic pre-amp, which connects via co-axial spdif. So I need a card with that I/O option.


Any ideas peeps?

In the meantime, I will continue to search this forum, and the rest of the web, to see what is available nowadays.

many thanks

andy

---------- Post added 06-19-2012 at 05:08 PM ---------- Previous post was 06-16-2012 at 08:28 AM ----------

Sorted.

I got some excellent advice from the Dawsons shop in Liverpool and I am now running my DSP through the Roland UA-55 QUAD-CAPTURE. Up to now I have had ten power hungry Absynth 5 patches all running at once and not even taxing my laptop CPU. A far cry from what I had to put up with on my old workstation...