Sound Card upgrade ?

That motherboard has an excellent audio sub-system. I don’t think you’re going to hear much of an improvement over an external sound card. If I had that motherboard the only reason I’d go for an external sound card would be to get I/O ports for recording or live performance sound.

FWIW - my two MacBook Airs have good built-in sound. With headphones, I can’t hear the difference between them and my Mackie MDB-USB DAC. Even on my QSC 8.2 speakers, there is only a very minor bump in the bass response, but it’s not significant enough for the average listener to notice the difference.

If your system ASIO or WASAPI drivers give you low latency the biggest upgrade you can make is with better loudspeakers, even with average onboard sound chip. Look to get some decent active loudspeakers with at least 5.25" woofers.

After that you can consider a better internal soundcard or external sound device if you want, the difference will be relatively far smaller but should also be worthwhile.

Re: Recording

- if you are recording Pianoteq, you don’t need an audio interface, you can record Pianoteq directly in the computer at the highest quality. Technically, you would record your performance as MIDI and then export to an audio file.

- if you are recording vocals or acoustic instruments, the main advantage of using an audio interface is that you can use high quality professional mics to get better recordings (assuming you know how to use the mics properly).

- the Alesis Core 1 is an audio interface that works with dynamic or battery operated mics (no phantom power). You can also directly plug-in and record an electric guitar. The Alesis Core 1 is a mono only device, so it cannot be used to record in stereo.

- if you have a condenser mic, you need an audio interface that supplies 48 volt phantom power to the mic.

Re: Audio Output
On your system the built-in Realtek Audio and Alesis Core 1 Audio interface are the best audio output options*.They are probably equal in playback quality. To be practical, I’d reserve the Alesis Core 1 for recording and connect my speakers to the built-in Realtek Audio.

* note: NVIDIA High Quality Audio is for HDMI playback

Thanks again for the help. I'm glad I started this thread as I was way off in the way I thought it worked.

So even if I had a high quality audio interface set up it has nothing to do with improving the quality of recordings through Pianoteq. The only aspect the interface would effect is what you hear while playing through either your headphones or external monitors ? I assumed otherwise because of the vast difference of audio quality you hear with piano videos on youtube.

I may just look at a quality pair of headphones for playing the piano instead then as I do not use speakers and the DP 10x speakers are quite poor.

Thanks again for all the help.