Over the years I've spent a fair few bob on music gear. Most of my purchases have been made after lots of research and generally speaking I've been left happy with what I've bought.

To date my worst ever purchase was a Les Paul Classic which cost a whopping £1,200 (over $1600!)- although it looked great, the frets buzzed and it didn't sound as good as my friend's guitar which was about one sixth of the price.

BUT the was in a past life. Since getting into synths I have to tell you, the biggest waste of money I feel I ever spent, was on an expensive pro audio sound card. I'll not give the name cos I'm not out to have a go at any particular company or card.

The point is... I was getting along quite happily with my mega cheap SB value card and I was making some good sounds with it. Since getting this new card, the recording process has become much more complicated PLUS I've been forced into buying expensive additional extras that I didn't need with my cheaper soundcard (eg- a mixer with a built in pre amp). Not only that, but I now need to buy monitors cos the (large and pefectly functional) speakers I've been using happily for years are no longer any good with the new card (cos when I plug the speaker jack into the output of my new card, the sound only comes out of one speaker instead of two, so I need to suddenly invest in a stereo speaker system with 2 jacks instead of one. If all of this wasn't enough, my hard drive has became cluttered loads of unwanted wav files since getting the new card (the reasons are slightly difficult to explain, but it centres around the fact that my new card can't play Cubase AND record from Sound Forge at the same time, whereas my old (cheap) card could. This means that when I record I have to do it from Cubase only, and as you know, in Cubase every single take you do is saved whether you like it or not)

FINALLY, to top it all off... I can't even notice any great difference in sound quality with the two cards. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure statically my expensive card is much better in terms of bit rate and all that stuff, but when it comes to listening to a song I've made on a CD player... there's not any noticable difference at all! Please don't slag my ears- I know they work fine.

Incidentally, when I was burning songs on my old card, nobody EVER complained about the sound quality.

Anyway, that's it. I'm through. Sorry for dragging on with this, but I just had to get it off my chest.

PS- Elvis and the Beatles never used fancy sound cards, and nobody seems to be complaining about that, do they?