Question About Sound Cards

**Planetary** · 07-18-2012

Generally I get that mixing is about eq'ing and cutting and all them other little tweaks that generally makes your sound better from the way it was before. But I have a sound card that is integrated meaning it was there when I bought the pc a few years back. Here is an example of what my beat sounds like with it:

http://soundcloud.com/initialzsoundz/classics-laid-back

So my question is, even if I get better speakers for hearing, for example, KRK 6 Speakers, would I still need a good sound card for my beats to render better?

Because sometimes I notice that, my beats when rendered does not sound the way it is on fruity (I'm using FL Studio 10 btw), is that all due down to a better price sound card?

Thanks for reading

**B Side Producer** · 07-18-2012

Could be.
Hard to tell with you not having proper speakers and not having a proper soundcard.
Your beat does sound poorly mixed and mastered. Very muddy, as far as my very quick listen told me.
If you have proper speakers, they're only gonna be as good as your A/I is, so it would be good to have both.
In what price range you need to look is all up to you. There are ppl working with logitech monitor speakers and the soundcard it comes with and there are ppl working with the most expensive A/Is and monitors.
A general rule of thumb that mostly works is that quality doesn't come cheap! Cheap is a very vague term in this. Depends a bit on what you want for you money. Are you gonna use microphones? Than you probably want a preamp. Do you want your A/I to have that preamp built in or are you gonna get a seperate preamp? Preamps in A/Is , certainly the cheaper ones, aren't the best there are. Echo has some pretty nice preamps for the price but their A/Is start at about 300 bucks I think?
Other than that, do you want to hook instruments to your A/I? Are you gonna use midi over it? Or do you have midi over usb controllers?
Best option for you would be to get a proper A/I and monitor speakers. Speakers will set you back bout 200 to 250 minimally and an A/I could be bought for 100 bucks, double that at least to get a tad better A/I.
Search the forum on this, there's a lot of posts about it.
On a footnote, not unimportant at all, how are you on your theory? It might well be that your tracks sound like this because your mixing, mastering and general skills in music productions aren't good enough to get that awesome industry sound. It'd mean you'd need to brush up on them. Than, that also becomes a lot more doable if you have some basic proper equipment.
For any beat or bedroom producer, who wants to make tracks that come very close to professional tracks with industry sound, an A/I, Monitor speakers and some sort of a midi controller are unmissable.
Watch out for advice though, the opinions differ a lot! There's ppl pointing to speakers that cost 500 bucks a piece and ppl telling you you should have an A/I of at least 500 bucks. This ain't true, it all depends on what you can and are willing to afford. Everyone has to start somewhere. IMO, there's probably a lot of ppl having more gear than knowledge. You also see a lot of ppl selling their stuff because they found out producing and all of it's knowledge that is necessary is not something that will come to you in your sleep and you don't need to work for!

**krushing** · 07-20-2012

The soundcard doesn't directly affect the rendering at all - but obviously its d/a converters affect what you hear and thus base your mixing choices on. But at this level, the speakers & the room are gonna have a much bigger impact on things than upgrading the conversion. There are of course a myriad of other reasons for getting a nice interface...

**CoMpLeXx** · 07-20-2012

a thing taht fruity does which anoys people and can play witht he redering is the circular panning law which it has on by default also a soundcard is nothing to do with rendering your beats.

**WYKED** · 07-21-2012

Originally Posted by CoMpLeXx

a thing taht fruity does which anoys people and can play witht he redering is the circular panning law which it has on by default also a soundcard is nothing to do with rendering your beats.

Exactly why I use Ableton

**CPhoenix** · 07-21-2012

I hear this is a common problem people have w/ FL.

Check your settings before rendering. The only reaason it would sound different in FL than it does when u mixdown is because you're accidentally telling FL to make it sound different.

And yeah the interface doesnt render your sounds... the computer renders it. the interface helps you hear your sounds better while you're mixing, helps the DAW run more stable, provides audio in/out and sometimes midi in/out. thats essentially it.... but those are a pretty big deal to most people.