When recording into your DAW....

do you have any advice for getting the best signal into (and out of) your DAW?

i have cubase and my soundcard has 4 audio ins.

Should I record my hardware at the highest level going into Cubase and then afterwards set the volumes on Cubase, using the Cubase mixer?

also i have been recording into cubase, and before recording i set the equaliser on my soundcard based on how the beat sounds on my speakers. i have tannoy speakers.

then afterwards in cubase i tweak it a little using the cubase mixer

however when i concert it to mp3 it never sounds as good as it does on my speakers...so i have to go back to cubase and then change the mixer settings based on what i hear in the mp3.

quite frustrating

any tips ?

Wow dude, you seemed really lost in this stuff. Nah but all jokes aside, you'll probably need to do some tweaking until you find a medium between things sounding good in your studio as well as other places.

It doesn't take much except the willingness to sit down and do some adjusting here and there.

you probably wanna record everything really hot (or loud in case you didnt catch that) but well enough under 0.0db so that youre not clipping and you have some headroom to get louder or simply excite certain frequencies based on what you feel is necessary.. by recording it louder you preserve the dynamics rather than overcompressing everything and losing quality when you find its too quiet for your liking...

the onboard eq in your soundcard? not a good idea imo... record everything flat and use your daw for all mixing purposes you have a computer theres no need to do it the low budget way unless youre searching for a certain sound characteristics by using outboard gear but your interface is hardly necessary for that purpose...

also all speakers are different everyone knows this so if your speakers make everything sound really good and in the car it sounds like a muffled p.o.s then you either need to learn what frequencies it exadgerates or find speakers with better response...