which sound card?

[shannonredeemed]

Hi i'm Shannon , and I need some hope. I have some what of a learning disablity and I am going to try to use "dragon naturally speaking preferred 9" to help me in college this fall. I am looking at buying a Dell Inspiron 1520 Notebook. But I need to make sure I'm buying the right sound card to give me the best result for the program. Dell gives me 2 options for sound, which would be better: 1) Intel High Definition Audio 2.0 which come standard or 2) Intergrated Sound Blaster Audigy HD Software Edition which is $25 more? Naturally speaking program requires: 16-bit Creative Labs Sound Blaster, or compatible sound card capable of and set to 16-bit, 11KHz for audio recording. I'm not sure how much info you need about the cpu, but here's some: Windows Vista, Core 2 Duo processer, 2GB memory, & 160Gb hard drive. Please help.

[Deerpark]

Both of those sound cards can easily handle the requirements for your program. And I honestly don't think you'll be able to hear a significant difference between the two. So I would go for the basic option.

[Calum]

Both sound cards are basically the same, the second is just a fancy version of the first but not really any better.
After looking at some reviews, this is a basic summary of what I have seen.
You need a pretty powerful PC or Dragon will slow it down - you have that.
Creative SB 16 bit is not available any more, it's very old - some people say it needs a good sound card, others say it works fine with onboard sound like you have.  I'd say you'd be fine with standard onboard sound, it's easily the equivalent of an old card like the Sound Blaster 16-bit.
Apparently Vista helps the program work better, so that's good news too.
One last thing - apparently a noise cancelling microphone really helps, so you might want to look at one of those.