Best hook up for Delta 66, Omni + Soundblaster

[Paul881]

I have a PII 400, win 98, 764 meg ram, Dlta 66 + omni I/O and a soundblaster Live! Platignum 5.1 sound card which I use for soundfonts & midi.

At the moment, I have some crappy PC active speakers which are plugged into the output of the s/blaster. I have the monitor outs from the omni plugged into the Line In on the Live! front panel. Is this the best configuration, or is it best that I connect the speakers to the omni and feed the speaker output of the s/blaster to an input on the omni?

At present, every time I click the mouse or scroll or whatever, I am getting discharge/static noise through the speakers. This is irrespective of the volume settings in the omni and the soundblaster.

 

[j]

have you tried any software samplers? i'm sure they all do SF2....this might help, gettin a faster PC will definitely help...what happens when you don't have the soundblaster and the delta patched into each other? i would definitely be going line out on the soundblaster to line inputs on the omni....not sure this will solve your electrical problem , though.

 

[brzilian]

Sounds to like you are throwing away all good, clean sound by running the output of the Delta into the noisy SB Live. SB's pick up way too much interference from your HD's and motherboard. I would just take thee SB out of the chain...

 

[AlChuck]

What I do is run the output of the SB Live and the output of the Delta to a small mixer and from there to the monitor speakers.

Not sure what is causing your mousing problem.

 

[Paul881]

I sorted the problem. There were two issues, a faulty 'Y' lead (brand new!) from the monitor o/puts of the omni, plus hooking the delta into the s/b.

So I plugged both the omni and the s/blaster into a stereo dual socket adaptor and then plugged that into my crappy speaker system input. For some reason, the faulty lead seemed to amplify all the h/d noise, just as brzilian says. The only way I can get some h/d noise now is to max out the crappy active speaker system volume. But thats unreasonable anyhow, at "normal volume it sounds fine. Well, as fine as I can get outa those speakers. If I can't get any decent speakers in the near future, I might look for an inexpensive mixer, I only need a couple of channels, might even make one.

Soon as I can, I'm going to get Live synth pro so I can get rid of the s/blaster. I only need it for s/fonts.

Until I heard the delta 66 omni, I didn't fully appreciate just how noisy the s/b is. Creative must be stupid, with just a little more effort they could have ruled the earth. Instead they do 70-80% of the job and then bottle out.

Still, the pre's on the 66 are amazing, and the silence (in the quiet bits) is deafening!

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions.

 

[AlChuck]

Until I heard the delta 66 omni, I didn't fully appreciate just how noisy the s/b is. Creative must be stupid, with just a little more effort they could have ruled the earth. Instead they do 70-80% of the job and then bottle out.

But how would they have done that without raising the price of the Live card to that of the Delta (or higher since there are more "things" in the SB Live) -- and killing themselves, because their whole market is the broad consumer base for multimedia PCs...

Still, the pre's on the 66 are amazing, and the silence (in the quiet bits) is deafening!

You mean, of course, the pres on the OMNI box... there are no preamps on the Delta 66 itself.

Soon as I can, I'm going to get Live synth pro so I can get rid of the s/blaster. I only need it for s/fonts.

Before you pull out the SB Live, you might want to see what running a softsynth for all your MIDI parts does to your track count/plug-in usage. Softsynths use resources. The nice thing about the SB is it plays Sound Fonts beautifully without being a ding on your system resources -- well, except for the RAM you allocate to it.

...it sounds fine. Well, as fine as I can get outa those speakers.

If you appreciated the difference between the Delta and the SB Live's audio recording/playback quality, wait until you hear what you're missing by monitoting on poor speakers. The day I unplugged my old Bose stereo speakers and plugged in a pair of Alesis M1 Actives was a revelation. I couldn't believe all the detail and spaciousness I never knew was there.

 

[Paul881]

Yes, but the Audigy Live! Platignum is over £210 pounds sterling, thats $325, and you still don't get full 24 bit duplex. My Delta 66 and my omni was about $550, the delta 66 on its own was about $240. A more useful comparison was the Audiophile 2496, a much better soundcard than the Audigy for around the same price....or less than the Audigy.

If Creative had gone to the trouble of committing to a new chip design (Audigy processor), they could have taken a bit more time to develop a real winner. Going that extra mile would not have been too difficult.

Yep, I meant the omni pre-amps, not the delta...cos like you say, it don't have em.

Good point about the resource though, I hadn't appreciated that. Maybe I'll reconsider my options there.

When I was in Digital Village, Cambridge buying my Delta 66 & omni, I heard the new KRK V4 actives. Absolutely stunning. So I can well imagine the difference between the performance (not) that I have now and what an upgrade will bring me. Oh well, its only money. The Alesis speakers look a serious piece of kit too. My current speakers sound like WWII headphones!