Please Someone Help A Beginner!!!, What to buy Options

[Hamish]

I have just ordered a G4 dual processor, and am now trying to piece together the rest of my setup. I have come to the stage of choosing a souncard and midi interface. Interface wise I'm gonna go for the emagic MT4 is this wise? But I am stuck for a soundcard, I've been looking at the M-Audio range, but really don't have any idea, can someone give me a hint, bearing in mind I want to spend around £200 - £250.

[rickenbacker]

This is a topic that comes up a lot, so have a scout around these forums and you're bound to turn up some gold dust.

For your money, there are quite a few products available. M-Audio are OK, although there have been a few disgruntled users here in recent months. Edirol make some good stuff, Emagic have their own audio interfaces, plus there are many more.

A good way of checking out what's out there is to get hold of a mail order catalogue (say, Jigsaw if you're in the UK) or go through a mag like Sound on Sound, price everything up and then either search the web for user's reports or come back here and ask about/search for specific products. There's bound to be someone who's using what you're considering buying.

Happy hunting!

[Levon River]

In my own research on various interfaces, I find this place to be pretty well up-to-date, and with the best and most orderly categorization I've found. Here is their Audio Interfaces main page:

http://www.audiomidi.com/hardware/audio.cfm

The individual pages for each type of interface (firewire, USB, PCI card, etc.) then lists all the ones available in that category, with a brief description, their price, and a link to an individual page for that item. Very handy reference page when shopping for hardware and a jumping-off point for more research. I recommend you bookmark it.

[clarence169]

I have a small bit of advice that I found out the hard and expensive way.

If you want to record some work that you will be happy with, wait a bit longer, save your money and buy a unit a little better than the ones you are thinking about.

I bought the M-Audio unit,used it, hated it and returned it. I bought the MOTU 828 after a little saving and FREAKING loved the ease of use and sound quality. If you only need 2 ins and outs look to the DIGIDESIGN MBox. REALLY seriously good unit.

I have a G4 933, 7542M RAM, 120G HD, MOTU 828, MIDEX 3, CUBASE SX all running under OSX 10.2.5 and have no problems and a really easy system to use. That is of course if you already know how to use Cubase.

The monitors are also VERY important to the overall mix. I went for the KRK V6's in the end after trying to go on the less expensive route.

I know this all sounds like a lot of dough, and it is not "cheap" but what you will have you will LOVE! I wasted hundreds of dollars going "cheap", not liking it and then losing money on trade in or re-sell of the unit i did not even enjoy using while I had it.

Cheers and good luck...