BleepingComputer.com: Digital sound into laptop

Hi, I am in charge of our audio/video system for our church. What I am aiming to do is, pipe in the audio from our sound board to our laptop. I know this can be done, by USB, I hooked in an older kind of slower laptop into it, and the playback into the board was fine. But things went south when I grabbed a mic and tried to make a test recording into the SONAR software on the laptop. When I played back the recording either on the laptop or thru the house system, I could hear voice but it was all staticky and distorted, almost like there was an input turned up to high. I played with it some but never could lose the static. Here is the mixer board we are currently working with .. Allen&Heath ZED24 .. I wont bother to list the specs of the laptop I tested with, other than besides the fact of the system itself being just over a year old, the processor was only an older single core celeron with 1g of ram. But that part dont so much matter because I am cleared to buy a brand new laptop for this application, which is what I need a little guidance on.

My plan is to continue to use the USB out feature of the board to record things like sermons and speakers and live singing performances. Is this a good idea to do thru USB? Even with getting a brand new i7 machine? The playback from PC into the board isnt so much a problem, it works either thru the USB or line out to audio cable into the board. If the USB is a bad idea, can someone kindly give me a hardware list of what I will need to get this up and running?

I need to make a decision in the next few days so i need some help pretty quick. Thanks in advance!

I suspect your problem will likely resolve with a decent spec computer. SONAR (even LE) needs a reasonable system, the spec for 8.5 LE says:

"Minimum System Requirements
Processor Speed Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1500+"

"Recommended System Requirements
Processor Speed Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz [EM64T] or AMD Athlon XP 2800+ or better"

And things like the hard drive speed and fragmentation state contributes also, as do other running processes.

One way to check would be to see if a less demanding application like Audacity sees the USB input and records correctly.

Also, is using USB for recording live sound a bad thing as far as being too taxing on the processor to be reliable? I would think it should be ok if the computer is only running the sound application when it needs to, as you said, very few other processes.

USB is fine. Firewire is slightly more efficient, but professional audio interfaces successfully use one or the other. My e-Mu 0404 is USB.