J. Anthony Allen explains why your computer's built-in audio hardware fails for professional recording. Built-in mics and 3.5mm jacks can't handle XLR microphones without degrading quality, and the internal converters lose fidelity. An external audio interface solves this with high-quality converters, multiple XLR inputs, and better monitoring.
Okay, so there's one piece of hardware that you might want to get that is the one thing that most people don't know that they need. It's an extra little box that is just designed for professional audio work. So before I tell you what it is, let me explain why we need it. So let's say you want to record something on your computer. Your computer probably has a microphone built into it, right? So you've got a little microphone built into your computer somewhere. But that's not a professional microphone. That's really just designed to pick up your voice for, you know, video chat and things like that. If you want to use a professional microphone, you're going to get one that looks like this, and it's going to have a cable coming out of it that looks like this. Now, this is called an XLR cable. And one end of it looks like that. It has three pins. So now you're going to look around your computer and you're going to find a spot for you to plug this kind of a cable into your laptop or desktop and you're going to come up empty. No computer that I have ever seen has the ability to plug one of these directly into it. Just doesn't happen. But perhaps you have a computer and it has a little 8th inch microphone Jack in it. So you could get some adapters and plug into that 8th inch microphone input. If you have a PC, it might have this. So hypothetically, let's say you get some adapters and you plug your microphone into that little microphone input. Going through adapters is never a great idea when it comes to professional quality sound. But let's just roll with it for a minute. What's happening now is we have that analog and digital problem, right, that we talked about earlier. So this microphone is analog, okay? My voice is analog. Microphone is picking up an analog signal when it goes down that wire through your adapters and into that little 8th inch jack on your computer. Still analog till it gets to the computer. Once it gets to the computer, your computer has a little chip in it that's called an adc. An ADC stands for Analog to Digital Converter. That little chip is designed to convert an analog signal to a digital signal. Simple enough. Once it's a digital signal, it can roll through your computer and get into your software and do whatever we need to do with it. Now the problem is what's built into your computer is a cheap little ADC thing. It's not very good for professional quality audio. We need a bigger, more robust and more Accurate analog to digital converter. Because that conversion of analog to digital is important. How we convert that signal is really important because you can lose a lot of fidelity on that conversion if you don't do it very well. And the things built into your computer, whether it's a Mac or a PC, they're just not very good. They're not designed to be professional quality. So what we do is we get a separate box. We get a box, it looks like this. This is an analog to digital converter and it's so much more. But let's start with analog to digital converter. So we can plug in a microphone. So that solves that adapter problem, right? We can plug in a microphone here or here. We can plug multiple microphones in. That solves another problem that we'll get to down the road. And then we can plug this with USB into our computer. Now, this box is an analog to digital converter. It's going to convert that signal into a digital signal with much more care than your computer is going to do it. These are designed to be fairly good, right now there are cheap ones of these and there are very expensive analog to digital converters that you can get. Talk more about that in the next video. This has another function too though, because when you plug in headphones to your computer, you get that same little 8th inch adapter. Right? Now headphones to your computer is fine, but that same process, but backwards has to happen. Somewhere in your computer there's a little circuit called the DAC digital to analog converter. And that is also not professional quality. Cheap little one that's built into there. And yes, it sounds fine when you're listening to Spotify and things, but when you're really mixing music and you're listening close to music, you want a high quality digital to analog converter as well. And this does that too. One box is an analog to digital converter, meaning we can plug a microphone into it and send it to the computer. And a digital to analog converter, meaning we can plug our speakers or our headphones directly into it and listen to our sound converts, both. So if you want professional quality sound, you need one of these boxes. We don't call it an analog to digital converter and a digital analog converter. We have one word for these boxes and it is an audio interface. That's what this is, it's an audio interface. So let's go to a new video and talk about what to look for in an audio interface.
