I read all sorts of terrible things about the M-Audio drivers prior to
acquiring the PCI card. Just thought I'd mention a finding.
Rule #1 seems to be: Never, ever, never access the M-Audio preference
pane through the icon in the dock. At least not if you already have
this pane open through System Preferences, and maybe not under any
circumstances. I discovered this accidentally. Once I'd installed and
updated the drivers, I saw the M-Audio thing in System Preferences,
and figured, OK, that's how I get to it. I didn't put an M-Audio alias
in the Dock. For the longest time I didn't notice it there when the
preference pane was open, and then I saw it but didn't know what it
was and ignored it. The other day I finally realized, oh, that's an M-
Audio icon down there. So I clicked on it. Instant kernel panic. So I
shut down, powered up again, logged in, and opened the M-Audio prefs
the old way. No problems.
The M-Audio interface certainly has its quirks. Some settings are
saved, and some you seemingly need to reinstate each and every time
you open the prefs pane. Lately it's been problematic setting up and
saving speaker sets, and impossible to delete old ones. Fortunately, a
good working setting that I'd set up early seems to be intact, so the
aforementioned amounts to a very minor problem. Overall, my experience
with the sound card has been good. Tremendous sound quality, both out
and in, head and shoulders above the already fine Apple-installed
SoundBlaster and Apple Screamer cards I'd worked with before. Works
great with (not to mention made possible) my newly expanded speaker
system, 2 Altec Lansing speakers with subwoofer plus 2 more with
integrated subwoofers (all powered).
Anyway, on the off chance that the oddity I mentioned in the second
paragraph is the reason your Revolution 7.1 is sitting in a drawer
right now, I mention it. The kernel panic I mentioned is the one and
only instance of a SYSTEM problem caused by the card/drivers in at
least 6 weeks of frequent and intense use (in Leopard - drivers also
installed in Tiger although I haven't worked with the M-Audio there).
This despite the fact that the "fine print" of the driver install
process mentions "does not support CPU upgrades" - and I started out
using it with a Sonnet 1.0 GHz CPU upgrade and have since installed a
1.6 GHz CPU.
Sean Carroll
slcarr...@me.com
Power Mac G4 AGP "Sawtooth" 1.6 GHz, 2 GB RAM, SATA 750 GB hard drive,
Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 and Tiger 10.4.11,
Gigabit Ethernet & M-Audio Revolution 7.1 PCI cards, ATI Radeon 9800
Pro 128 MB AGP
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