Originally Posted By: Robh
As far a internal or external sound card go there is no reason for external unless you are talking recording input needs, or sending midi to a synth. Just a working musician playing for an audience any good signal sent out and summed at the mixer with suffice, especially when you consider back ground noise, room acoustics, and PA dynamics.


This is exactly it. This is all the OP Mike is asking about and for that a laptop's headphone out is just as good as a good interface. An interface has nothing to do with improving playback sound quality when compared to a newer laptop. The outputs are designed to go to a high powered home theater sound system. If it was crappy sound everybody would hear it and they don't. Interfaces are needed for recording not simply playback and this is where I disagree with Guitarhacker.

Your built in soundcard has no problem outputting a high quality stereo signal from your DAW. It isn't processing all the midi synth and audio tracks, your DAW is doing that and the DAW's mixer sends the signal to the soundcard. If you don't believe me recheck your audio output setup inside Biab, Sonar or whatever DAW you're using. Everything is summed to a final wav out and that's all the soundcard sees. All the soundcard is doing is routing the resulting mix out, not processing the midi and such. Any glitches you hear are happening before your computer's built in soundcard.

Another thing is latency and ASIO. With PG software the default is to use MME as the audio output driver because not too many people play a midi instrument through Biab live using a softsynth like the TTS-1. If you do that then yes, latency is a problem and you need ASIO but if you're not playing a midi softsynth live then ASIO is irrelevant.

Other DAW's though can be a different story if they require ASIO and don't have an MME or WDM audio output option.

Bob

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