audiophile question

[rhythm]

Hello all....
I'm shopping around to upgrade the "stock" soundcard on my PC. Since I won't be requiring several I/O lines simultaneously I have been considering the M-Audio Audiophile 2496, as it seems pretty well spoken of and is very attractively priced. However I am curious to get opinions on a couple of issues:

1) This card has no internal input for audio from a CD drive. For those of you who own this card, has this been much of a hassle or problem? I know of a couple of workarounds, but I was wondering what some users of this soundcard thought of this issue. Perhaps many of the competing soundcards are also lacking this kind of internal input and I just haven't read about it?

2) Lack of balanced analog I/O - I suppose this means a little less flexibility in choosing levels, but since the card is pretty highly spoken of I'm assuming this may not be a huge issue. I won't be running any cabling of great length, so perhaps it won't be an issue for me? Curious about thoughts on this; I guess it isn't a whole lot more money to get a card with balanced I/O.....

Thanks for reading!

greg

 

[Slackmaster2K]

1) You'll use Digital Audio Extraction in your CD playing application (e.g. Windows Media Player). This is actually beneficial, in that you'll use the Audiophile's good quality converters to playback the music instead of the extremely cheap converters built into the CDROM drive itself. This allows you to better develop your monitoring habits.

Known problems with DAE is skipping and dropouts during playback. Most problems in this area seem to be with CDRW drives, as most CDROM drives seem to work just fine.

2) Balanced I/O isn't an issue probably. You can run balanced equipment into your unbalanced card without worrying about compatibility. I wonder though, does the audiophile still support -10/+4 like the rest of the Delta line? Typically +4 is associated with balanced connections but it's not a hard & fast rule or anything. Regardless, I wouldn't sweat it much. Balancing itself isn't all that necessary unless you're making very long cable runs or are in a *very* noisy environment (RF kind of noise, not kids and wives kind of noise

Slackmaster 2000

 

[BluesMeister]

CD-ROM Digital Audio

Hi Rhythm,

My Terratec EWX24/96 has an on-board S/PDIF connector that connects to the digital audio output of my LG CD-ROM by way of a cable.

Unfortunately I have to disable the optical digital input in order to use the S/PDIF digital input. Why is it so Terratec? Believe me, it's a Royal PIA to swap the jumpers around if I wanted to use the optical input.

Have you considered the Echo Mia audio card? If I'm not mistaken that has balanced inputs. It doesn't have a MIDI connector though.

Slackmaster2k's suggestion is a good one if you have an audio card that doesn't have a CD connector.

You should compile a list of all the features you want then do a Google search for "audio cards" and check the features against price. Bundled software is also worth taking into account. This is what swayed me toward the Terratec. Although now I find I don't use any of the bundled software

--
BluesMeister

 

[rhythm]

Thanks Slackmaster and BluesMeister for the replies.

Slackmaster, the DAE sounds like a good plan. I'm guessing that the digital audio from the CD player reaches the soundcard by first traveling on the IDE bus to the motherboard. Anyway, using another application like Media Player sounds like no problem. As far as the level settings on the Audiophile card, the manual says that there are two choices for analog OUTPUT, 'consumer' and '-10dbV'. The analog INPUT is fixed at the 'consumer' setting. One particular review I read on this card mentions that the peak analog signal for input is +2dbV while the peak analog outputs are +2dbV for the 'consumer' setting and -4 dbV if using the '-10 dbV' setting. In any case, I suspect the card will do me just fine.

BluesMeister, you are correct about the Mia card having balanced inputs. I agree with you about making a list of features that I'm interested in, which is pretty much what I did. I found a chart on the web which lists many soundcards and their features in columns for a nice easy 'one-stop' comparison. Since I don't need many inputs/outputs and I'd like the flexibility of digital I/O and MIDI in case I go that route sometime, the Audiophile seems like a pretty good choice for me to start with.

Thanks again for the replies.

greg