Hi, I have been making some home recordings on my PC with some friends and have been using some basic equipment, sm57 into a small Behringer mixer into an audigy 2 card into soundforge and then cubasis. We wanted to just make some demo recordings, weren’t really too fussed about quality, but now it’s become a bit of a hobby and I wanted to try to improve the set up a bit. So I thought a good place to start would be to upgrade the soundcard, so I bought an m-audio audiophile 2496 card thinking it might improve the quality slightly, but turned out to sound worse. The tracks pick up more noise and there’s less clarity, I’ve played with the card settings and mic positioning but I cant get it to sound any better. Any advice on how to get it to sound better would be much appreciated but I think it’s probably that the rest of my equipment just sucks but I’m a bit reluctant to spend any more money on equipment as I'm a student and don’t have the funds to pay for it, So anyone who can help me make this set up sound half decent and any advice on equipment that isn’t going to mean i have to sell any body parts really would be doing me a massive favour, thanks Tom