Delta1010 & PA9 - Good combination?

[MrKwik]

I'v been dragging my feet about buying a decent sound card, mainly because I don't really have enough experience to know what I need. I think I have played around long enough to find where I'm lacking but I have a couple of questions for anybody that is using the M-Audio Delta 1010LT. I have pretty well decided on this card because it seems to have the most inputs in its price range & I have not really heard anything bad about it.

Thing is that I don't really understand how the inputs are layed out on this card. It says 10 in/10 out and 8 analog in/out with 2 xlr inputs. So does it have the 2 XLR and then 6 RCA inputs or does it have 8 RCA plus the 2 XLR? I'm a drummer and my main goal is to be able to lay down 8 seperate tracks at once. I have a Behringer MX2004A mixer with 4 output busses that I want to use 4 inputs and then I have 4 outs on my Alesis D4 module that I would also like seperate tracks for. Now if the card has 6 regular inputs and 2 xlr, is there any reason I cant use the balanced outputs on my mixers main bus to hook to those and the the remaining 6 analog inputs for mixer bus 3/4 and the drum module outputs?

And lastly...I am using Cakewalk PA9 on a Windows 98 machine. Are there any issues with this setup that would make this card a bad choice for this setup? And will my not-so-modern PC fall on its face trying to do 8 tracks at once? Right now my main issues (besides 2 inputs) is that I get alot of popping in the tracks, and when I monitor a track and then lay down another track, there is about a 1/2 second delay in the original track and the new track when I play it back. I'm assuming this is an issue with my soundcard (actually onboard sound on the MB), please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks in advance for any help

PC Specs:
-VIA 650mhz C3 processor
-256 meg of ram
-120gig WD 7200 RPM HD w/8meg cache
-Windows 98se
-Cakewalk Pro-Audio 9.3

 

[MBP2112]

Howyadoin,

A couple of recommendations computer-wise... I have a Delta 1010 (not LT), and I love it, especially now that I've built my new DAW. Otherwise, I'm not qualified to comment on the 1010LT.

The computer, on the other hand...

The VIA C3 has some good points for audio work, like very low power consumption that allows the chip to use a passive heatsink without a fan. The floating point processor, however, is very weak (this is a descendent of the Cyrix 6x86 series, which was notorious for poor floating point). Audio data is saved as 32-bit floating point numbers, and plugins use 32-bit floating point math to perform operations on the existing audio data.

The good news is that the C3 is pin-compatible with the Intel Celeron Socket 370 series. This means that your motherboard will take a Celeron without a problem, assuming the CPU isn't soldered to the motherboard, as I've seen on occasion with C3s . This means you can get a 1Ghz CPU for about $50, or as fast as the motherboard supports, anyway. This would improve performance on audio substantially, for short money.

The WD1200JB is a good choice for a hard drive. I assume your motherboard supports ATA100? If not, a Promise ATA100 controller card mightl help matters, although I'm leery of the impact that will have on the PCI bus that the Delta is talking on.

If you go to the 1GHz Celeron, I'd consider getting another 256MB and installing WinXP, then taking a hatchet to the Playskool GUI crap and unnecessary services, etc. There are some excellent websites devoted to setting up XP for audio work. Once you do that, you'll never go back to 98SE, and this is coming from a guy who never thought he'd ditch 98SE. The more memory you give Cakewalk and Windows, the happier it is, unless the Windows is 98SE, which tends to get cranky over 256MB. Bear in mind though that if you want to use Pro Tools Free, you'll need to keep 98SE available as a multiboot, because Free won't run on anything newer...

So that's about $150 in hardware upgrades to make this a much better rig for recording, no matter what soundcard you go with.

-Rav

 

[MrKwik]

I was afraid the PC was a bit on the weak side for audio work. The book says that is supports Ultra DMA 100, I'm a little foggy as to weather that is the same as ATA 100. Unfortunately the processor is soldered onto the board, and it does have a very small fan on the processor, but its pretty damn quiet. I did not originally buy this MB for a recording machine and at the time I needed a cheap board with everything onboard (no standing cards), which is why its the way it is. I imagine a MB upgrade is in the cards but I figure a decent sound card is the highest priority. I've grown rather fond of the newer AMD processors lately, and I figure I could upgrade reasonably to something a gig.5 or better. As for installing XP, I'd rather cut off a testicle with a cheese slicer than deal with XP. I would be willing to do 2000 pro but I saw somewhere that PA9 doesnt really agree with it. What would the advantages of XP be over 98se? I was basically thinking that 98 would be alot less of a memory hog than XP or 2K and would free that up for audio, no? Since nobody has offered any negative comments about the card, I will probably go ahead and order it in the morning. As long as I'm tracking with any effects, will my current machine do 6 or 8 tracks without going belly up?

Oh ya...and cn anybody clear me up on the input layout?

 

[MrKwik]

I ordered the Delta1010LT and I decided to go ahead and upgrade my MB and hopefully get it all right the first time. I scored an AMD AthlonXP 1700+. Hopefully that will be ballsey enough to do what I need to do. One more thing though, I was thinking about puting in a second drive and freeing up the 120 just for audio. I have heard that it helps to have a seperate system drive. The only extra drives I have are 5400RPM 2 or 2.5gig drives. Would it be OK to use a slower drive like that for the system drive and then the faster drive for audio or should I just leave it alone?