This month, we’re building an audio-recording PC to perfectly complement any home studio

CHRISTIAN GUYTON, STAFF WRITER

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY

THE CONCEPT

IN THEORY, a good PC for music or audio FX editing in a studio environment needs to do two things well. The first, of course, is audio encoding and handling. With recent advancements in motherboards, it might be possible to cover this base with just a high-end mobo, since virtually all modern mobos come equipped with on-board audio—the equivalent of a built-in sound card. Alternatively, you could go ahead and opt for a dedicated sound card, which is likely to provide you with better performance, or better yet an external DAC.

The other thing you want is silence. Background noise can spell doom for the sound quality in any live-recording studio, and the hum of fans inside a system can certainly be loud enough to disturb your sonic equilibrium. Low-RPM fans, along with a quiet cooler and PSU, are therefore a necessity. Manual fan control via your case is also a good idea, making it a cinch to drop the system noise to a minimum when the mics go live.

So we have two core tenets to abide by for our build this issue. Of course, a sound-studio system should also be a competent workstation PC in general, so we need a decent processor along with a discrete GPU, since using integrated graphics would put more strain on the processor, and we want this system to run cool so our fans can stick to lower speeds. Lastly, we want plenty of storage for all those chunky audio files.

This is certainly an interesting machine to plan and build, as we’re having to make use of what we can get hold of during the coronavirus lockdown, but we feel good about the choices we’ve made.

AUDIO READY

SOME WILL ARGUE that sound cards are obsolete in the present day, and they’re right—mostly. If you’re only using your PC for generic office work or entertainment, you can probably get away with just using your motherboard’s on-board sound. If you work with audio professionally, though, it’s a different story. A motherboard has limited space to dedicate solely to audio, while a discrete or external sound card has a lot more room to work with. To that end, we’ve chosen the Creative Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus.

Sitting in the neighboring expansion slot is the GPU, a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1650 4GB, which should be able to comfortably handle sound-editing software UIs running across dual monitors. The motherboard that hosts these two cards is also from Gigabyte: The affordable Z490 UD AC. Since we’re using a separate sound card, we don’t need a pricey mobo with amazing on-board audio.