First Time REW Setup - SC Look OK?

[wadesi]

Hi Folks,
I'm setting up REW for the first time. I'm on my third laptop and finally I think I've found one who's on board sound card will work. Go figure my 3 year old Dell Inspiron with Sigma Tel SC has a line-in option. The other two newer much more expensive laptops don't. (Realtek's) Since I've been trying to set this up for a few hours now, I'd like some help in identifying that everything looks ok. I'd rather not start taking any measurements until I'm 100% sure I'm past this stage. Here is my SC response:



Everything look OK?

Cheers

[brucek]

Yep, looks fine.

Most people use an external USB soundcard with their laptop for REW. They're quite inexpensive....

brucek

[waldo563]

If you're looking for an external soundcard to use, I have had pretty good luck with the Behringer UCA-202 model. Although it is pretty basic and doesn't have a lot of extra features, it is very inexpensive and seems pretty well built.

[wadesi]

Thanks for the feedback. I had everything at home to do the measurements except for the external sound card which is why I thought I'd give it a go. If the above looks fine, I will just use this laptop for my measurements. I'll be posting the REW results for my dual Shiva-X sealed in wall enclosure in the next couple of days.
Cheers!

[Sycraft]

The laptop's card will probably work just fine over all. In general, most soundcards, even cheap ones have pretty good FR, as your test indicates. It just isn't that hard to make them fairly flat these days. The main thing you get with a better card is less noise. Internal laptop cards are often pretty noisy. However that isn't such a big deal when you are just using it for calibrating a system.