best external sound card for laptop recording firewire

USB 1.1 is perfectly adequate for running a stereo in/out interface at the 24-bit/44.1kHz that most musicians still prefer, or 24-bit/96kHz for either recording or playback (but not both). Like many manufacturers, M Audio have both USB 1.1 and Firewire audio interfaces in their mobile range. And so USB (Universal Serial Buss) was born, although it initially had various teething troubles and its initial 1.1 version, with its 12 megabits per second (Mbps) transfer rate, had various audio limitations (more later on these and their cures). What peripheral manufacturers wanted was a new interface that allowed you to plug in additional devices without having to open up the computer, and with the potential to keep chaining as many as you wanted, preferably without even having to switch off the PC before you plugged them in. However, some PCI expansion cards still refused to co-exist with others in the same PC, requiring occasional card shuffling, and of course you still had to open up your PC and physically install each card into whatever expansion slots were still empty. When I first started reviewing soundcards for SOS, way back in 1996, they were of the ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) variety, and could be a nightmare to install - being mostly pre-Plug and Play they required manual selection of their IRQs (Interrupt Request Channels), DMA (Direct Memory Access), and I/O (Input/Output) addresses, to avoid conflicts with other expansion cards and motherboard devices already in the PC.įortunately, the twin advancements of Plug and Play and PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) cards made it far easier to install and configure a new soundcard, while laptop owners also had the one obvious choice of a PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) card for audio duties. We sort out the spec features that are really important.

There are now so many sizes, types and formats of audio interface available that it can seem well-nigh impossible to find the one that best suits your needs.

Best external sound card for laptop recording firewire