Aardvark Direct Pro v. Echo Mona or ???

  • Thread starter Thread starter LI Slim
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LI Slim

LI Slim

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It's just me and my guitar, mostly. My computer has PIII 667, 126 RAM, 20 GB. I've decided to get an all-in-one interface (ie, preamps built into soundcard). The Direct Pro 24/96 and Echo Mona appear to me to be the primary candidates. The Echo Mona looks to be a couple hundred more, but I'd live with it if it's better. Can anyone recommend either, or one over the other, or suggest another alternative in the same general price range? Thanks.
 
The Seasound is just marketing hype.

Get the Direct Pro. It has twice as much I/O as the Seasound, the mic preamps are outstanding. You can get one for less than $500 on the web. I use one at home and the stuff I am recording just sounds great. Why pay $300 more for the Mona. I dont get it.?
 
I bought mine from Sweetwater.com...but I have since seen lower prices at audiomidi.com and doctoraudio.com....hope that helps, I think you will be pretty happy with a Direct Pro.

Like you, I am a one man show at home and one of the best things about the Direct Pro, besides the preamp quality is the compression and EQ which is burned right into the DSP on the card, so you can use them in tracking real time...good luck!
 
reviews are in

The issue of Recording that's about to hit the newsstands has a review of the Aardvark Direct Pro and they have a lot of good things to say about it as well,except you lose the FX when recording at 96khz.It's currenyly the cheapest PC system I know of that has all three: Audio with 48v phantom,S/PDIF,and MIDI.I'll admit I'm tempted...
 
Sound On Sound (UK publication) has a slightly better review. I'm beginning to hate those Recording Magazine reviews; either that, or I've about had my fill of hearing the same stuff over and over again.

The Recording Magazine review spends two pages just advertising the features. At the end, there's about four sentences, saying, in effect, "This thing works ok and sounds pretty good." I'm so sick of these reviews that don't tell you a damn thing about how something SOUNDS!!!

You get the idea that nobody is really that impressed with most of the recording products coming out, but they are incapable of telling anyone "This thing sucks" because "this thing" has a big advertisement on page 22, you know?!!!

(However, this is not a slam on the DirectPro)
 
The fact is that all of this recording stuff sounds very darned good. The differences are subtle. It's much more the features and the level of support that distinguish them from one another. For example, do you need ASIO or GigaSampler drivers? Some cards don't have them.

By the way, I forgot another potential choice to add to your list. The Delta 44 and Delta 66, in conjunction with the new OMNI i/O, give you much the same feature set as the other cards already mentioned in the preamps-included subset. No on-board DSP effects, but otherwise very comparable. With the 44 going for as low as about $260 (add about $40 more for the 66) and the OMNI i/O for about another $250, it's also the lowest-proced option except perhaps for the DirectPro.

Good luck!

-AlChuck
 
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