sound card question

[djsilkysmooth]

So I've been putting together this studio with a Mac Pro and Ableton Live. It's rockin' the Radeon 1900 video card, 3GB RAM, dual 23" HD monitors, but my question is about the sound card.

To really turn this into a pro-level studio, do I need an external sound card, as described on the "DJ'ing with Apple" help page? I'm not mixing live here (with the computer anyway, I can still do that old skool analog style), and I can hear the output thru Ableton to match the trax. So what would an external sound card offer?

And I tried attaching a pic of the studio, but the size was too big. As you can tell, I'm a brand new Apple user. How can I compress the file and share a view of my efforts?

Thanks for your help.

 

[jesteraver]

Only thing I can tell you that the internal soundcard from Apple is a 24/96 while external ones from M-Audio are 24/192. Way better for sound production.

Hopefully when Apple starts using Blu-ray players in their computers we will have a 24-bit (sample depth)/192kHz (sample rate) audio processors *drools* I have to say what Apple is using for audio is pretty impressive.

If only we could actually plug in speakers directly into a Mac without having to buy a receiver of some sort, it would revival Mark Levinson

True we dont need like 192 kHz, even though our ears can only hear upto a certain kHz

 

[CanadaRAM]

Only thing I can tell you that the internal soundcard from Apple is a 24/96 while external ones from M-Audio are 24/192. Way better for sound production.

Hopefully when Apple starts using Blu-ray players in their computers we will have a 24-bit (sample depth)/192kHz (sample rate) audio processors *drools* I have to say what Apple is using for audio is pretty impressive.

True we dont need like 192 kHz, even though our ears can only hear upto a certain kHz

The bare numbers really don't signify much. A clean signal chain at 16/44.1 can sound better than a noisy or distorted or phase-inaccurate 24/192 chain.

The bitrate isn't the issue, the major reasons to move away from the built in audio are: Need more mic/line inputs and/or outputs, want support for a wider range of mics and levels (better preamp), want a quieter/better quality AD/DA conversion.

 

[djsilkysmooth]

update -- picture added

let's see if changing the photo size let's me to this....