hi guys I am building a new pc and want the best sound card possible so that I can copy my huge cassette collection onto cd.

What would be the best sound card for this job ?

Thank you.

Well, the more serious audiophiles on here would probably recommend an M-AUDIO sound card. Some of the high-end cards have a phono interface rather than the standard mini-jack.

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.list&ID=pciinterfaces

Johnny Walker, MysticEyes or Modo1 might have some more info for you.

I would have thought that any soundcard would actually get cassette to HDD quite satisfactorily ?

I have recently used my on-board sound to great effect.

It's the application to remove tape hiss, normalization and all the other facilities to clean up the audio.

If you want serious results then Adobe Audition has all thos facilities but at £400 you may want to compromise.

thanks for the tips guys. is there an easy how to or tutorial on adobe audition anywhere.

Thanks again

Most are available to buy on CD but you can grab a few snippets if you Google around:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/designcenter/search.cfm?product=Audition&go=Go

http://www.tagnet.org/aim/adobe-audition-tutorial.html
http://www.lakeland.cc.il.us/ctpd/tutorials/Audition/
http://www.pixel2life.com/tutorials/Adobe_Audition/All/
http://www.vtc.com/products/audition15.htm

For simple copying I would think almost all soundcards would do the job, even mobo integrated ones.
If you have any ambitions to get into multitrack recording then I would look to M-Audio or similar.
Horses for courses and all that
Good Luck
m