If you get involved with home music recording on your PC, there's a word that will become increasingly important to you as progress in your endeavors: latency.

Latency is the lag time between when a note is played or sung and when the computer records it. To put it in layman's terms, it's a combination of the delay of the computer's processing speed, and the circuitry of the soundcard. The lower the latency, the more powerful and more transparent the recording process is.

Why more powerful? Because if the latency is low enough, it's possible to do real time monitoring while a voice or instrument is being recorded. If not, you have to wait until recording's done to hear what something sounds like.

And if latency's low, it's possible to add real-time effects to the monitoring mix. So the singer can hear what she sounds like with a little echo or reverb on her voice. The guitarist can hear himself though a distortion plug-in.

Incidentally, we're talking milliseconds here: a 20-millisecond delay is just enough to throw off a musician's timing. Ideally, it should be under five milliseconds to make the recording process as transparent as possible.

The Soundblaster Experience

One of the most popular soundcards is Creative Labs' Soundblaster series. They're great for gamers, but not so great for those like to make music on their PCs.

As I found out the hard way.

I had my Soundblaster Audigy soundcard installed in a brand new, bitchin' custom-built 2.8 GHz PC late last year, for the express purpose of recording music using my Sonar recording program. But for whatever reason, the latency of the card in the new system was abysmal. I had to constantly slide tracks around to line them up to get them in time. And forget real-time monitoring of performances. It also made my USB-based guitar synthesizer track poorly.

The Audigy card had Soundblaster's LiveDrive front bay, which made recording, in some respects, fairly easy. You could plug a microphone in the front. Or amp modeling boxes like Roger Linn's AdrenaLinn unit. But the LiveDrive bay only has a single quarter-inch jack. Needless to say, stereo recording was out of the question, as was real-time monitoring. Recording a vocal isn't that difficult without real-time monitoring, although many vocalists are much more comfortable singing when they have reverb or echo on their voice. But an unprocessed instrument like electric guitar is much more problematic. The level of distortion impacts the timing of notes, particularly on lead parts. And it's much more difficult to judge an effective take without being able to hear what the guitar sounds like with its amplifier tone.

Enter The Omni-Studio

M-Audio's Omni Studio consists of two components: their Delta 66 PCI soundcard, and their Omni I/0 breakout box. Installing the two was a revelation: real-time monitoring? No sweat. Low latency? Under five milliseconds. Stereo inputs? Piece of cake. Other inputs? Check these out, from the M-Audio Website:

Neutrik connectors (XLR and 1/4" TRS)

mic/instrument preamps with 66dB gain

48V phantom power, individual gain controls, 20dB pad and signal/clip indicators

line inputs 3 and 4 (1/4" TRS)

4 direct outputs (1/4" TRS)

effects sends with level controls for each of the four D/A or direct monitor signals (1/4" TS)

stereo monitor outputs w/ level control (1/4" TRS)

stereo record outputs for mixdown deck (independent of monitor level) (1/4" TRS)

2 stereo headphone outputs with individual level controls (1/4" TRS)

stereo effects return (1/4" TS)

direct monitoring with full level and panning control

aux inputs 1 and 2 individually routable for monitoring or recording

master output signal/clip LEDs

S/PDIF digital I/O (coaxial) with 2-channel PCM

SCMS copy protection control

digital I/O supports surround-encoded AC-3 and DTS pass-through

up to 24-bit/96kHz performance

Having the M-Audio card revitalized my Adrenalinn box by allowing proper stereo recording--and monitoring. It revitalized my guitar synth by allowing it to track much better than it did before.