Hello-
I tried looking for this card in various stores and websites and couldn't
find it. Finally found someone selling them new on ebay and I got one. The
place was in Canada and it costs me $60 including shipping. Not a bad price
for a sound card with optical/digital in/out and DVD/AC3 6.0 sound (which
I'm not using right now).
Set up was pretty easy. The optical/digital daughter board has some plastic
on the right side that made it impossible to put in my computer the way I
wanted to. I had to take out my usb card, and one pci slot is now wasted,
but I don't have a complaint about that. Don't need more than two usb ports
right now anyway. But if you're low on pci slots, you may want to think
about this. Basically, the daughter board will only fit when placed to the
right of the main card, and can not be placed on the left. You'll probably
have to end up putting the daughter board in the last slot, and the main
card one above it. This may be good in that the sound card will be far away
from the fan and drives in your PC, possibly cutting down on any internal
noise.
Ran into some problems later with the PC not booting up. Took the card out,
and completely disabled the system's built-in sound and put the card back in
and presto--no problems. I suggest you disable whatever other sound
card/built in sound you have before installing this. You don't have to
remove your drivers, just disable them. Somehow, my PC doesn't
automatically shut off now which is weird, but it doesn't bother me. I just
shut off manually and there aren't any problems with drive-scans during the
next bootup.
Recording to MD is dead easy with the software that comes with it. Set the
pause time between tracks (mine's at 3), compile your files and you're good
to go. My computer didn't come with an internal digital cable from the
cd-rom to sound card (analog only) so I need to score one of those cables.
For now I'm going to go with the rip and copy method instead of copying
direct from cd to md. An extra step, but not a big deal with me since
ripping is pretty quick anyway.
By the way, it comes with an extra long optical cable. I'd say it's around
9 feet.
All in all, this is well worth the money. If you've got a crappy sound card
in your PC, or are still going with the built-in sound, get this thing. It
even has an option to support MDLP recording--it's quite modern. I don't
know what's different about that, but maybe it does something to prep the
files or something. At any rate, MDLP support is there, and it's obvious
from the documentation that they had MD recording in mind when they made
this card. The people I ordered it from on ebay were very cool and sent is
pretty quickly--CompuGlory out of Toronto.
By the way, the latest New Order single "Crystal" kicks total ass!
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