MEGA MILK wrote:I would tell him to stop being poor.
Warning: wall-o-text ahead probably only pariah will want to read all this.
haha as mean as it is Milk is pretty right.
for 500$ he's going to be pretty disappointed if he's looking to do some serious audio work.
firstly if he's looking to do some actual recording he's gonna need a decent ASIO capable sound card so that he can record without latency. As an example the card I have was somewhere between 400$-500$ (can't remember exactly now). It's a little higher level card since it has 8 ins and 8 outs with 4 built in pre-amps but for a lower level one that's still decent you're looking at around the 150-200$ range. When looking for a card (internal or USB/Firewire external) he should be looking at bit depth, sample rate and ASIO latency <10 ms (as low as he can go ideally).
And to push the latency down that low you'll need a fairly decent processor. I have an i3 330m (pretty crap I know) and I have trouble getting my latency bellow 8ms. If I go lower the audio starts to stutter. A four core CPU would probably be ideal.
if he's just going to stick to mixing and not do any actual recording then the latency doesn't matter...you can mix with a whole second of latency.
For ram I would say 4gigs as an absolute bare minimum but 8 would be ALOT better. I have 4gigs on my craptop and I can freeze/crash my system pretty easily when I'm doing audio editing.
Then there's the whole speaker issue. His mixes will suffer if he only uses PC speakers for mixing since they hype certain frequencies. His mix might sound good on his speakers but if he plays the song on different ones his mix could sound terrible since these other speakers will probably be hyping different frequencies than his which will throw his EQ job all out of whack.
He'll need to invest in either near field studio monitors which would be minimum 300-400$ or a pair of studio monitor headphones which would be 100-150$ for some decent ones. But even with headphones his mixes might suffer due to something called Fletcher-Munsen effects.
Basically the louder and/or closer to your ear something is the better it's gonna sound to you. Headphones amplify this effect and could make his mixes sound artificially more badass then they are in actuality due to the proximity of the headphone speakers to his ears.
Then there's his DAW (digital audio workstation). He could pirate them but if he's looking to pay they are not cheap programs. If he isn't going to be making any money off his mixes he can get Reaper for 60$. That's probably the best "cheap" DAW I can recommend. It's actually my favorite DAW regardless of price. It has an awesome feature set and it's open source so it updates very frequently and there's alot of add-ons available.
What kind of audio work exactly is he looking to do Pariah? And if he's pretty serious about the audio thing it's gonna need to be an either/or type of build.
If he's serious about doing the audio thing then forget the graphics card and put extra money into tailoring the rig for audio. if gaming's more important then lose the audio card and dump money into the GPU. I don't think he's going to be able to have his cake and eat it too...especially not for 500$. If he can somehow up his budget to 750$ or 1000$ then I think he'd be alot happier with the result.
