Can I have two sound cards in one PC and will both of them work!?!?

[lsakhvoruk]

This is my question! I have two PCs, one is an old Pentium 120Mhz and the other is an Athlon 1Gig, I use both of them for sound recording and wanted to know if I could simply plug in both cards into the Athlon machine and use dual monitor setup to eliminate the Pentium 120 slowness? Is this possible?

Also if I insert two video cards into a system will they work as a dual head setup or will one be selected and the other one disabled or will it just simply not work at all?

Thanks for all the input! Leo.

[ljmoray]

I'm not sure I understand your question, and I don't really understand why you'd want to do! I have had experience with on board sound and PCI sound card in same system. Don't remeber exactly what happens, but I did need to disable the onboard audio in order to get the PCI card to work!

[Charliey]

Im not sure about sound cards, but i do know aobut video cards.

You can put in 2 separate cards, and they will create a dual head setup. If you have a dual head card, and add another single card, you could get 3 monitors. You can add any combination up to 9 monitors, as long as you have pci slots. Even putting in a dualhead agp card, and a dualhead pci card (if you can find one) would work for 4 screens.

Right now ive got a 32mb ATI Rage128 AGP card, and a 2mb Matrox Millenium pci card, running a 17" and 14" monitor in a dual head setup. Its very nice to work on, and although the matrox card is a little old, (i got it for $20), it supports enough resolutions for my 14" screen.

[morriswindgate]

Yes you can have two sound cards, but they have to be virtually identical in their chipset/programming and everything else. If you are wanting to set this up for home recording and such. Get a professional sound card set-up.

http://www.sweetwater.com/home.tpl

[audiyoda]

Originally posted by morriswindgate
Yes you can have two sound cards, but they have to be virtually identical in their chipset/programming and everything else. If you are wanting to set this up for home recording and such. Get a professional sound card set-up.

http://www.sweetwater.com/home.tpl

Agreed. The two cards would have to be identical due to driver conflict issues. Sweetwater is a great retail resource for sound as is Zzound (http://www.zzound.com). For instruction as such, my favorite on-line source is ProRec (http://www.prorec.com).

-Craig

[nightfishing]

egad!

I have 8 tracks recorded mastered and burned and I use VERY different Soundcards.

I guess I'll have to scrap the whole album and start over (snicker, snicker).

If you wanted to RECORD to BOTH cards at the same time (i.e. to expand the number of channels you have available) then identical cards would be necessary.

But, if you want to use them in any other configuration, different cards are fine.

In my case i use a second card basically as a sampler and my primary to record to.

Since the second card has a much reduced role in my studio, I didn't need to spend as much on it as I did my primaary.

Not all combos will work, but I have had quite a few on a few different systems without any problems.

A warning, though, identical SB's are often the cause of problems. If you are looking for an inexpensive setup, don't combine identical Live! cards in the same box.

Also, the Radeon VE is a great option for a DAW; two monitors, one card.