Capturing VHS: Audio to AIW 9800 Pro vs. audio to sound card?
 

So I have bought what I need for my VHS digiting project, finally...
In a nutshell, the capture card that I'm going to use is the ATI All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro, and I also bought an old custom Windows XP machine for this project, everything's bought off from eBay BTW (except some parts from Amazon). I know this may have been discussed for a bit but for the highest quality audio w/o any artifacts and/or distortion, is it better to feed the RCA cables from my VCR to the AIW card, or RCA to the 3.5mm line input on my sound card? Nothing has been shipped as of this post, but from the pictures, the card may be a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. I understand VDub can capture lossless audio, just looking for perfect audio w/o any errors, distortion, etc. Thanks.

Send the audio to the sound card. Your XP computer's CPU will have its hands full enough with the video processing. Best to take that load off and move it to a dedicated sound card.

I haven't personally used an AIW 9800 Pro, but if I'm reading the specs right on CNet then there isn't actually any audio function on the card itself at all. The audio is simply a pass-through to another device, either your sound card or motherboard audio. You want to use a (good) sound card.

Thanks, I'll get a RCA to 3.5mm cable for the audio to feed in the sound card.

The AIW breakout box ought to already have the proper cable. Just plug your RCA jacks into the breakout box, then plug the audio pigtail from the breakout box into your sound card.

I've run into interference issues with our ATI AIW at times, and now mostly bypass AIW altogether. A longer mini > RCA is wrapped around AIW purple box cord, tapes at the box, so connections are still in the same locations. I switch stuff a lot, need easy access to ports.

Only my main personal system still uses the AUX cable.