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What is digital audio?

What do digital preamps and audio production unit(like avid's mbox) do? planning on recording with my laptop.?

  • basically i have seen these article http://www.ehow.com/how_5097499_plug-guitar-laptop.html and before i've seen this i was recording with my amp and zoom g1x effect through the mic socket on my laptop and connecting it as line-in.. surprisingly it sounded like crap.. recording with the digital mic of my laptop was a lot better...What do digital preamps and audio production unit(like avid's mbox) do? its on the article... any good advice?opinions?

  • Answer:

    The G1X doesn't output a line level signal, that's why that sounded bad. There's no such thing as a "digital mic", the idea just doesn't make sense. Any microphone is going to convert sound pressure into an electrical signal... that's analog. Whether or not that signal gets converted to 1's and 0's later is irrelevant to how the mic works. Anyways, those are called "audio interfaces" and they are what you use to connect musical instruments and things to the computer. They're high quality AD/DA converters designed to work with the specific types of electrical signals generated by guitars, keyboards, microphones, etc If you want to record music on your computer, you need one. I like the MBOXs, they are very nice quality and an excellent deal... especially when you consider the fact that they come with Pro Tools. Most other DAW software (Cubase, Logic, etc) will run you about $500 on its own. You've still got to buy an interface, which can easily run you $250 or more. You can get an MBOX, with Pro Tools, for about $500. Pro Tools also requires Avid hardware... Logic, Cubase, etc will all work on anything you've got. So if you ever want to try PT, you need that hardware anyway.

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What do you mean by 'digital mic'? Avid's Mbox, M-Audio's Fast Track, Alesis's io2, Apogee's Duet - they're all known as 'audio interfaces'. They allow you to record with a PC. Their primary function is to convert analogue electric signals (like the signal generated by a mic or electric guitar) into digital data that the computer can understand. This is known as analogue-to-digital conversion (aka A/D, ADC). Microphones generate very weak signals, so before anything useful can be done with those signals, they need to be amplified to 'line level' by a preamp. Almost all audio interfaces will have some mic preamps. If the device claims to have 'mic inputs', that implies it has preamps. Most interfaces also have 'line ins', which is useful if you have an instrument like a keyboard which doesn't need to pass through a preamp. Guitar (and bass) signals differ from line level in two ways: they're a lot weaker, and they are 'high impedance' (don't worry about this term for now). To solve this, instead of using a preamp, we use a DI box. You can buy one for cheap, but some interfaces like Alesis io2 and some Presonus boxes have built-in DI (usually labeled 'instrument in' or 'hi-Z' or 'guitar'). At the end of the day, an interface is a magic box ;) that connects to your machine via USB or Firewire, and allows you to record at solid levels with very low noise and low latency (so there's no delay between playing a note and hearing it come out the speakers).

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