by summers » Sun Oct 18, 2020 10:03 am
Probably depends on what other hardware you have.
Me, on my desk top, I record via an external Focusrite usb box. That box is good, it records at stupidly high rate, and bits, with very low noise, does phantom power. But importantly it buffers data before going across the usb. I believe it has its own internal clock (actually I should check). So for me that focusrite box does all the hard work, the desk top computer just needs to read the data.
But if you have a microphone just going straight into your computer, and the computer sound card doesn't do buffering, or has its own clock; then yes the OS e.g. the kernel needs *very* good timing - it isn't really what the linux OS is designed for, but yes will work with real time kernel.
Its the same with MIDI signals (e.g. from a keyboard), yes need good timing, until you have got the time signal into the midi packets.
My advice, is if you want any kind of quality - go to an external usb sound box like the focusrite. That will put you back £150 or so - but that is a good investment, as you trying to do anything that gets close to that quality would take huge time and expense.