ProFire 2626 or Fast Track Ultra 8R

[mjamed]

Hello everyone

I want to buy a recording interface. M Audio seems to be a good company with good support.

I can’t decide weather to get ProFire 2626 or Fast Track Ultra 8R

They seem to be very similar.

Please advice

 

[pipelineaudio]

The profire 2626 seems to be a DICE-2 card. I would avoid like the plague, there are enough things to worry about in this world without pulling your hair out over that

 

[jaybriggs84]

My profire 2626 works just fine, I don't know what is supposed to be wrong with them. Firewire seems to be the more stable interface, but technically USB 2.0 is faster. I'd still go firewire though

 

[dgatwood]

My profire 2626 works just fine, I don't know what is supposed to be wrong with them. Firewire seems to be the more stable interface, but technically USB 2.0 is faster. I'd still go firewire though

The DICE II chipset tends to work very well for some people and not at all for others, and I'm not sure there's much rhyme or reason to it.

Maybe they've improved their drivers, or maybe your hardware just happens to be something that works well with it. Hard to say.

 

[pipelineaudio]

when we were evaluating DICE-II, one test setup actually had three identical PC's. One of them ran ok, though with the expected ridiculously high latency, and the expected dropouts, but the other two barely ran it at all. It's the weirdest thing.

NForce chipsets are supposed to mostly be incompatible with DICE-II, but it seemed to do sort of kind of OK on our dual opteron. Its a shame that what seems to be a purpose built device, which could really set the standard in affordable multi-channel audio has had such a rocky start

 

[mjamed]

it seems that Fast Track Ultra 8R is a safer option, isn't ?

 

[pipelineaudio]

there was a problem with the Fastrak's for a while where the output would bleed back into the input, but I think maudio fixed that, and as far as I know it was only the fastrak usb that had the problem

 

[Hard2Hear]

I haven't had a successful report of the Fast Track ultra working at higher sample rates. Not saying it doesn't work, just saying Ive asked people to let me know if they can get it to work and no one so far can.