Hi,
I've battled with sound cards, my ideal fit would have been something
like a Delta 66 with real balanced outs on the last two ports but sadly
that isn't the case.
The Delta 1010LT is cheap but unbalanced ruins it for
production/broadcast (hello to the hiss on cable runs).
The only PCI/PCIe cards I found that were reasonably priced when I was
stuck with a Delta 44 and needed 2 more inputs were the ESI Juli@. They
are good cards but pricey considering you get two outs and two ins.
I'm wary of USB cards although I must admit I've got an EMU 0202 (sadly
out of production) and another one that I'm blanking on the brand that
have both been running for over 6 years now. Only other USB I had an
Echo Gina on test for a few weeks, I think one of our offices in South
Africa still uses it. Seemed to work fine but ALSA mutes either Left
out or Right out by default so you have to change the levels in
alsamixer before you waste time thinking its a wiring fault. It had all
the ins/outs I needed but I wasn't happy with it being USB
I have used Saffire Pro LEs and the 10 ins/outs firewire rackmount
versions. Also had another expensive Firewire rack mount which I think
was a MOTU 828 Mk II. Firewire absolutely sucks on sound cards in Linux
in terms of driver support so avoid like the plague. The LE dropped
some outputs then upped and died after 3 years, the MOTU lasted about 4
and the rack mount Saffire ended up with bricked firmware that could not
be fixed after about 3 years.
Only other card if you move up to about £400 that I quite liked was the
Digigram VX442. It has tons of outputs all as XLRs and apparently has
ALSA support but it seems you need their drivers which are Redhat only
so I've never tried them under linux. I've had two of these for nearly
5 years, it has some driver issues on Windows Servers which caused
horrible crackling on some IBM xServers but which was fine on a random
PC.
Had some older Digigrams which I think were PCX 922s, again good cards
and still working as new near to the 10 year mark. Could never get them
going under linux either.
So yeah if anyone knows of a "Delta 66/Echo Gina'alike" which is PCIe
I'm still searching.
Regards,
Wayne
On 2014-01-06 21:43, Lorne Tyndale wrote:
Hi,
I've had similar hits and misses with USB audio solutions, as a
general
rule I now avoid them, for consumer use they are fine but for a more
professional environment I've found they lack reliability.
In my opinion you're better off with an actual card. I will also
echo
having good results with m-audio delta stuff. The biggest difficulty
that I've run into is with the M-Audio Delta 1010 (the one with the
external rack mount breakout box). I've experienced capacitors going
bad in the breakout boxes resulting in loss of audio and / or poor
audio
quality. In every one of these, after replacing the capacitors -
everything has returned to full functionality.
The Delta 44's and 66's don't experience this - their breakout boxes
are
just pass-through boxes if I recall correctly (it has been a while
since
I've had one of those apart).
I'm not *opposed* to USB solutions, but have been bit in the past
with
24/7/365 operation reliability issues of USB devices, but maybe that
is
a thing of the past...
It seems to me there is a hole in the market for something more
flexible
than on-board, yet not as expensive as ASI. M-Audio was the perfect
fit
for this market, but do they even make anything besides headphones
now-a-days?
-Alan
_______________________________________________
Rivendell-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://caspian.paravelsystems.com/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev
_______________________________________________
Rivendell-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://caspian.paravelsystems.com/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev
_______________________________________________
Rivendell-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://caspian.paravelsystems.com/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev
