2496 card

I've had this card for nearly 10 years. Never had a problem. Been moved through about 6 pc's and still as awesome as the day I bought it. I have another, brand new, spare one I bought about 6 years ago. I don't think it'll be getting any use for a while.

The 24/96 are solid. I'd recommend to anyone.
 
Mr Clean said:
I've had this card for nearly 10 years. Never had a problem. Been moved through about 6 pc's and still as awesome as the day I bought it. I have another, brand new, spare one I bought about 6 years ago. I don't think it'll be getting any use for a while.

The 24/96 are solid. I'd recommend to anyone.
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Right on Mr C. I believe the cards are on offer because there will be no drivers after Win 8 (not sure if there are w8 ones!) because the M-Audio empire is split up. M's still look after PCI, FW and some usb kit but the Fast track pro is in the hands of Avid...For now!

Many in the industry predict a total meltdown of the whole shebang. Still! Don't let that stop you buying a card (or a cheap Pro come to that!) Plenty of peeps have the drivers on file, so as long as you be running XP or 7, keep rockin'!

Dave.
 
Don't buy unless you have older motherboards. PCI on newer motherboards is a kludge: PCIe is implemented in hardware, but PCI only emulated from the PCIe bus.
 
Kesh said:
Don't buy unless you have older motherboards. PCI on newer motherboards is a kludge: PCIe is implemented in hardware, but PCI only emulated from the PCIe bus.
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How "new is "newer"? I heard a bit about this but I don't think the setup would have much trouble running 2 analogue channels, S/PDIF and MIDI?

I shall check in another place!
Dave.
 
ecc83 said:
How "new is "newer"? I heard a bit about this but I don't think the setup would have much trouble running 2 analogue channels, S/PDIF and MIDI?

I shall check in another place!
Dave.
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I think around the jump between sandy bridge and ivy bridge. Obviously there are a lot of chip sets out there, so a detailed answer is difficult. I think one issue is the software emulation of PCI adds latency, even though total throughput is fine. And it's the kind of latency you cannot control as the buffer sizes are fixed.

But for £40 you can probably afford to risk it.
 
When they drop below $10 I'll buy one and put it in a shadow box to hang on the wall with an engraved plate that reads 'Break In Case of Emergency'.
 
Doctor Varney said:
I'm afraid the link isn't working for me. It opens the Maplins page but says the product doesn't exist.
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Hi Doc,
Open the Maplin page and type in the product code in the search box. "A47HY".

Got mine 2 hours ago. BTW I thought I would give the bundled Protools M powered a do. Did not work and stopped my internet from coming up!

I ran Ccleaner and the amount of crap in the Registry was huge! Still no net. Uninstalled with Revo', more junk in the Reg'. Reboot, back on line.
This was on a 7yrs old 3.G P4 and XP home.

Later today I shall fit the new card and sync it with the old one and see what 'appen!

Dave.
 
Doctor Varney said:
Thanks Dave! That's very good and it has the breakout cable and MIDI in/ out. Great price, too.
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Happy you are happy Doc!

I shall belay fitting my card tonight (other problem came up). In any case I have decided to have a system revamp.
It alll sort of "growed" and I want to rationalize it a bit. I have a mixer that feeds two 5mtr balanced XLR lines to a box containing two OEP 10K-10K line bridging and unbalancing transformers. They feed the RCAs on the 2406. The traffs are very GOOD traffs but still traffs! Not so bad when the mixer was a Bellringer 802 but tis now an A&H ZED10 so I want to do better (why I wanted an AP192!) so I shall build an electronic "unbal" box using NE5532s. (Hmm? I could REALLY do with not going to work for a week or 3 but then I couldn't afford the kit!).

Ha! I shall spend some time the morrow going thru our drawer of 10k R's and matching them to better than 0.1%!

Dave.
 
Doctor Varney said:
...Great price, too.
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Meh. It's $61 at Maplin, $70 at B&H. Clearly this dinosaur has been discontinued. You'll probably be able to score one for $19.95 at geeks.com in a couple of months.

I had a 1010LT and the drivers kind of sucked. I'd like to think that M-Audio did a better job with the 2496 but I kind of doubt it.
 
wheelema said:
Meh. It's $61 at Maplin, $70 at B&H. Clearly this dinosaur has been discontinued. You'll probably be able to score one for $19.95 at geeks.com in a couple of months.

I had a 1010LT and the drivers kind of sucked. I'd like to think that M-Audio did a better job with the 2496 but I kind of doubt it.
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In the 5 or so years that I have been inflicting myself upon various forums I have only read of a tiny, tiny fraction of people that have had driver/PC issues with M-Audio products. Indeed, they have been one of the very few interface people who have had drivers ready and waiting for a new OS.

There was a guy at Studio-Central that had some problems and swore off M-As but when you consider that the 2496 and the Fast track pro have probably outsold every other soundcard and AI COMBINED on the planet the incidence of failure is practrically zero. (compare this to the total mayhem Fussywire caused when it was first used for audio? )
SoundBlaster cards are probably the next most common re fit but are complete trash for any serious recording work.

My two 2496's have worked flawlessly in a P4 XP home, AMD dual core XPpro, HP dual core 2.7G Win 7/64 bit AND! A P4 with Windows Media Centre which is SAID to be unsupported! (I just ran XPPro drivers. Bish-bosh)
The Fast track pro worked in all the above as well as an i3 HP W7/64 lappy and an HP 850mHz laptop with 1/2G ram.

I will agree about one thing, the cards have had their day which is why they are being flogged off cheap so if you don't have an old PC handy don't buy one, but FFS! They have lasted bloody well!

I think M-A were stupid not to develop a decent PCIe card or two. The AP192 and maybe a 1010lt type with ADAT?

Dave.
 
HI Dave, I'm so glad you are so excited about the 2496 - I just bought one and installed it in my computer (HP xw4400 Workstation) - So far, I've not been able to find any help/guidance to properly set up (or understand how to use) the card's M-Audio Control Panel. I use the Sound Forge Audio Studio 10 software to record, and all I want to record from is my own Vinyl/LP collection (50+ years of Blues & Rock'nRoll) and the occasional streaming sounds from a variety of internet providers. That simple mission is being thwarted by my inability to see the "source" sound waveforms as I try to record - I can record alright, but cannot control the source signal's volume because I cannot see it... I only see it after the fact, once I've finished recording.
Can you help? Also, for some reason, the driver software I have for my 2496 is version 5.10.0.5078, but in my resent searches for Win 7 drivers for my 2496, the only version I've seen is 5.10.0.5074???
 
Hi Mr. Clean- I'm new to digital recording, having been an analog recorder for the past 50 years. Times do change however, and finally all my analog gear is starting to let go (Sansui receivers, Teac Reel to Reels, etc.) I'm retired now (fixed income) and cannot afford the repairs any longer. So, I bought me an M-Audio 2496 Audiophile sound card and stuck it into my HP Workstation (XW-4400)/Windows 7. Everything went well until I tried to set up the cards parameters with the M-Audio Control Panel facility??? Research has revealed that the 2496 had great help/guidance User Manuals for Win 98 and even XP, but none of that is available for Win 7??? Everything's different in the visual graphics that help you set up for Win 98 & XP, and the few graphics there are for Win 7 do not help any at all. Can you help me with this?
 
JFCman, The later control panel for the 2496 is very limited compared to the original but if you have the CD for the card I think you can still install it in Win 7. In fact I seem to recall that you can download the old CP from Avid? However, in some ten years of use I have to confess that I never really understood ALL the ramifications of the CP! I would sort of eff about with settings until I got what I needed to do working. N.B. You can save any setup you find that does the job.

The levels issue. If you are recording from vinyl you must have some form of RIAA corrected pre amp? The technique is therefore to set all the card's "faders" to max and control the level out of the pre amp. If there is no such level control one is easily made, just a stereo 10k log pot in a tin or maybe there is a box you can buy? Or, run the pre amp into the line inputs of a cheap mixer.

You want to run at 24 bits (and I can see no reason to go other than 44.1kHz?) yes, 24 bits even for vinyl (which is at best equive to 11 bits!) because you want to record down at an average of -20dBFS so as to leave room for the inevitable clicks and pops.

Recording internal internet sounds might be more of a challenge? I used the "Monitor Mix" function but that seems to have been dropped in the new CP. Some DAW software will do it, Samplitude Pro X Silver is one such.

Dave.
 
A 10+ year old piece of hardware that doesn't appear to have driver support any more can't have been your best option?!
 
VomitHatSteve said:
A 10+ year old piece of hardware that doesn't appear to have driver support any more can't have been your best option?!
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"Don't knock it til......"! It has only been in very recent times that external interfaces were produced that could match the low latency performance of the 2496 and until VERY recently such AIs were very expensive, the NI KA6 is the only one I know of under £200 that beats the PCI card?

Budget USB interfaces generally had poor to horrible drivers (one exception actually was the M-A Fast track pro!). FussyWire faired better but 5 years ago, FW was a lottery unless you had a TI chipset (and that did not ALWAYS work!) FW AIs were, feature for feature more expensive than USB. FireWire has now of course practically gone from PCs.

For decent converter quality and low latency the 2596 and decent mixer STILL takes some beating! Would I go that route now? No but there are now some pretty tasty and affordable USB AIs about.

Dave.
 
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