Purchasing A Sound Card... Need Advice.

General Discussion
1

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Purchasing a PCI soundcard from my local music store… REALLY WANT to go for more of the audio interface external but unfortunitly my budget dosnt allow this so my choices that this carrier has is the Creative E-MU Series or the M-AUDIO series PCI’s… any opinions as far as which would be good and which models would be the best? Thanks in advance. Kudos!!

…::niNja_pWn3d::…

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2

Go for whatever has ASIO + more ports + lower noise floor

3

Get ready to hear lots of bad stuff about m-audio.

Let me start: They have bad drivers and bad support… This is annoying. I have a firewire Solo, it works fine on OS X, not so fine on windows.

otherwise, I like their product, it’s good for the price.

I owned an M-audio 2496 PCI card before, I don’t suggest it.

If you have the budget, you want a Motu Ultralite Mk3

4

I got the M-Audio Delta 1010LT and it works great, worked great on my XP machine, and works great on my current W7 x64 one, and everyone I know that has one haven’t had any issues with it either. I also tried it on Ubuntu without hickups. And I’ve borrowed one of the external M-Audio ones (can’t remember which one now) from a friend at one point when I was on XP, also worked without any problems. But as I said, I only tried that on my XP machine, so I can’t vouch for it working good on any other setup.

5

i agree with another guy, if you have a budget go for MOTU Ultralite mk3. If not - EMU is good and also try interfaces from ECHO and ESI.

Dont go M-Audio. They dont give a fuck about customer.

6

echo interfaces are p. nice. i really like the audiofire2 and audiofire4.

7

RME

http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_overview_pci.php#intern

The best there is. I’m currently saving/keeping an eye out on ebay for an HDSP 9632.

8

You can get higher - METRIC HALO or even PRISM devices.

9

i use a ‘m audio fast track pro’ perfect for home studio and i also use it for performance. :)

10

Or Lavry Engineering. They gold-plate the front panels of their stuff(!)

11

I also use the fast track pro from m-audio, great quality for the price imo. Like Michael Cordedda, im planning on using it live and its made for live use. It is a usb connected interface/card, so they say if you want the very best latency you should go with a card directly hooked into your motherboard. But I get 2.9 milliseconds with the fasttrack, which is fine by mystandards.
I’ve heard that MAudio has bad drivers and are slow on updates, but between my fast track and my previously owned delta/66 omnistudio, i never had any problems.

12

Hi

are you able to get multichannel output with Fasttrack pro in Renoise? I can’t get second output (Analog 3/4) in Renoise’s Mixer, it only offers S/PDIF 3/4 …

BR,

Zhac

13

Hi Zhac,

I just replied to your email support request, but I’ll reply in here as well for the the benefit of anyone else that might be experiencing the same thing.

I have an M-Audio Firewire Audiophile 4/6 myself, and I have experienced the same situation before. What I had to do was go into Renoise’s audio preferences and disable the option for “Limit to stereo in/out”. Once I disabled this, then it became possible to route tracks to Analog 1/2 as well as Analog 3/4. Hopefully it’s the same for you with the Fasttrack Pro.

More info on Renoise’s audio preferences:
http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Preferences#Audio