Art Dps & Mpa

  • Thread starter Thread starter rio452001
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rio452001

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Hi there,

I'm looking for a mic pre with a digital out (SPDIF) to use with my Delta 1010.

I plugged in an ART DPS and found that the signal out of the SPDIF was really low, and distorted, to the extent it was unusable.

I have a Mindprint Di-Port which I use with another card, and the level of the signal out of that is great-- the DPS, by comparison, barely registered on the meters.

I'm thinking this particular unit has a malfuction (it's not the cables or the soundcards, already checked) but if anyone has any experience using the SPDIF on the ART DPS, let me know.

Also, is the ART Digital MPA likely to be a substantial improvement? Anybody have experience with that?

thanks,

Rio
 
rio452001 said:
Hi there,

I'm looking for a mic pre with a digital out (SPDIF) to use with my Delta 1010.

I plugged in an ART DPS and found that the signal out of the SPDIF was really low, and distorted, to the extent it was unusable.

I have a Mindprint Di-Port which I use with another card, and the level of the signal out of that is great-- the DPS, by comparison, barely registered on the meters.

I'm thinking this particular unit has a malfuction (it's not the cables or the soundcards, already checked) but if anyone has any experience using the SPDIF on the ART DPS, let me know.

Also, is the ART Digital MPA likely to be a substantial improvement? Anybody have experience with that?
Click to expand...

Well, yeah. I seriously doubt that the DPS is supposed to sound like that...much more likely that it's broken. Is it under warranty? I've heard good things about ART's warranty service.

Frank
 
its possible that the ouput from the ART was not sending at the same sample rate that the card was looking to recieve....this will make a very strange kinda "boingy" sound...
 
I use a Digital MPA with my MOTU Traveler. It's not perfect, in that I can't effortlessly switch among all 6 different clock speed settings on both units without getting into static/click/pop-land, but when I clock them together with an external clock, I get very good results at 96khz, which is what I want. It took a lot of time and frustration to get to that point (trying the buzillion different combinations of who is master, who is slave, what is terminated, at what clock rate, optical or copper, etc.).
 
Thanks for your messages... as it turned out, the absence of an SPDIF signal was probably my fault.

I had the "inserts" plugged into my patchbay, with nothing going into the inserts-- that had the effect of bypassing the SPDIF signal, of course, so I was getting no digital out because there wasn't anything connected to the inserts leading to the digital output...

Dumb dumb dumb

In any case, after all that, I decided not to keep the DPS (it was a second-hand model I was trying out) but to move up to a new Digital MPA, and I must say, from the bit of tinkering I've done with it to date, it seems like it's gonna be a very useful tool.

Oh, and one more thing (this is my edit): Antichef, yeah man, there's a gazillion things to consider when setting this all up, it's almost limitless, the number of variables, trying to get the DPS and MPA set up with my other gear.
 
Well, I've got an MPA Gold, with some NOS tubes rolled in, and I gotta say it totally kicks butt over the starved-plate design of the lower-level ART pre's. I'm sure the MPA Digital will serve you well.
 
BudgetMC said:
Well, I've got an MPA Gold, with some NOS tubes rolled in, and I gotta say it totally kicks butt over the starved-plate design of the lower-level ART pre's. I'm sure the MPA Digital will serve you well.
Click to expand...

I have to say, I am *not* a fan of low budget gear, but the MPA stands out in that crowd. It doesn't sound fantastic on everything, but what does? For two channels at $300 (maybe $380 after a tube swap), it beats the heck out of anything else at that price point.

Frank
 
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