Hacker News Reader

Comment by akronim | Hacker News Reader

Seeing as the word "latency" doesn't make an appearance anywhere on the page, I'm assuming anyone doing audio work will still benefit from a decent card. (Why? Because when you hit a key on your midi keyboard/drums, and want it to be like playing a piano/drumkit, you want the minimum latency before you hear the note so it feels more like the real thing)

View on HN

You will most certainly want a real audio interface for doing audio production. Latency is one reason, but they also provide multiple simultaneous inputs, better analog to digital converters, and the good ones provide decent mic preamps.

If you wanna get pedantic, he did say that the exception is people who invested in quality headphones, and if you're doing audio work, that exception probably covers you. I suppose there is a set of such people who only have high-quality speakers and no quality headphones, but now we're really picking nits.

It's a nit worth picking; I am ever-so-slightly hearing-impaired (congenital) to the point where I only need the $80 Bose headphones instead of the $300 imported-from-Europe headphones for my audio work, and motherboard sound cards are fine for quality but horrid for latency.

Everybody's got their own needs. :3

Many people doing serious audio work use Firewire interfaces. PCIe cards are certainly still used, moreso with higher-end setups. I've seen setups that can get around 4ms of round-trip latency, which is quite impressive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com