can somebody recommend a PCI card with 8 analog ins?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hi_Flyer
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therage! said:
Chess,

What don't you like about the i88x? The pre's are good aren't they? Are the A/D converters as good/better than a 1010?
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Pres and converters are fine. The plugins it comes with are a big bonus. It's just that it's kind of a nightmarish piece of technology to have to deal with. It comes with no "control panel" or software mixer. And there are latency issues when you start pushing the amount of simultaneous inputs and outputs. I wouldn't even want to try and track an entire band with it.
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I have two Aardvark Q10 interfaces with 8 analog inputs each.

These perform well, but are risky. Aardvark went Chapter 13 and died, so the hardware/drivers is frozen as-is.

IMO, these cards are contenders *if* you can firesale them cheap. The latest drivers are stable under WinXP/SP1 (will never work under SP2), and Sonar 4.0.3.

These are throw-away hardware, because the company is kaput. Knowing this, if you can steal them cheap, they work well.
 
well, I bought an i88X and I guess I'm sorta in the "testing" phase with it right now... In some ways its working better than the pair of Delta 44s and in some ways its not. Playback with a few plug-ins going gets jittery at a much lower CPU usage point compared to the Delta, but the i88X records the 8 simultaneous tracks without much of a problem, plus the hardware is awesome and its way ahead of the Delta breakout boxes.

I still may send the thing back to zzounds.com since they have a 30-day return policy.
 
Reggie said:
I wonder if a 2nd hard drive wouldn't do you the most good. I can record a couple tracks at a time onto my main OS harddrive, but things get choked with more tracks. A partition only does so much good. You really need an entirely separate HD for performance gains. If this doesn't solve it, you either have buggy software (prolly not), buggy soundcard/drivers (prolly not), or a sketchy motherboard (possibly).
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I have a second internal drive, but I believe its on the same IDE channel, so there wouldn't be any performance improvement anyway.

Truth is that its probably about time for a new computer as well. I have a Dell Dimension 1.99GHz Intel P4 thats over three years old now. I'm pretty sure I have it configured optimally, however I'm sure I would get much better performance from a brand new machine that I build from the ground up, with audio apps in mind...
 
Raw-Tracks said:
As mentioned, you can't sync 2 Delta 44's together. In order to sync multiple Delta cards reliably, you need to chain the S/PDIF i/o's so they are all referencing the same wordclock. It is unlikely that your clicks and pops are due to a driver issue, more likely a worclock issue. M-Audio's drivers are usually pretty good. And yes, Delta cards all use the same drivers.
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That's something which isn't really explained very well in the manuals for these cards, is it? It's pretty much mandatory that to use multiple cards you need to link them via S/PDIF so that one unit becomes the slave to the other's clock.

You would probably have better luck with a Delta 1010 or 1010LT. If you're wanting to go firewire, take a look at the Presonus Firepod. I've got a buddy who has one, and he loves it. It's nice because it has 8 mic pre's onboard.
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I use a Delta1010 and it has really clean A/D converters and playback is really clean too (unlike the Mac's noisy popcorn soundcard). Latency isn't really an issue (a slight doubling effect which is OK for vocals) and M-audio are continually undating their drivers for extended support.
Only problem is that there's no preamps on the unit....you'll need to find yourself another device to provide phantom power to condenser mics.

Good luck!
Dags
 
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