Is the Guillemot Maxi Studio ISIS card really that bad?

[Dingo]

I touched on this in another topic, but I thought I'd ask the question outright. Feature-wise, the ISIS card gives me everything I need for about the right price. But, according to http://www.bway.net/~rongon/home_rec/soundcard.html, it uses the ESS Maestro 2 chip (is that correct? I couldn't find which chip is used specified on the Guillemot website anywhere), which, according to http://www.pcavtech.com, performs very badly on the analog -> digital side of things (poor to very poor on everything except dynamic range).

So, my question is, are there any users of this card who are willing to come out of the woodwork and discuss they results they have achieved with this card. The actual card tested at pcavtech wasn't the ISIS card (it was the Diamond Sonic Impact), so could it be other factors on the Diamond card that caused the terrible results?

Thanks in advance!

Tim

 

[mastahnke]

It does indeed use the chip mentioned above, however, it only uses that chip when it is in multi-media mode, not when the breakout box is active and you are really going to record. So far, I have liked the card a lot, although I have only used it a few times. It is expandable, up to 36 MB or RAM to dump MIDI stuff into. If I could just learn about all that MIDI stuff, it could be fun. I like the card, the only thing I have not liked about the card is that it has only four outs. I would like 8x8 but I am picky. Basically you have to automate yoru mixdown in software rather than on a board. The recordings sound great though, and having optical I/O is nice.

MIKE