Edirol Da-2496

[cunk]

It's "Go time" and I'm almost ready to purchase an audio interface.Can Cakewalk Home Studio or Home Studio XL be used with an Edirol DA-2496?

This is what I have learned through out this pains taking week!

No USB

Pro tools limits you to Pro tools.

Converters are important.

Preamps are Important.

If I get a card with 8in/8out..no pre's, I can get 2 pre's now and uprgade to 8 later with seperate pre's or a mixer w/pre's.

The Delta 1010 is popular. Is it because it is affordable or because it is good? why are there so many of them on Ebay?


Please correct me on any thing you feel the need to.

Thanks for the help
This BB has been very helpful.

Thanks again
p.s.

 

[dachay2tnr]

I'm not familiar with the Edirol DA2496; but I am familiar with the Delta 1010, as I own one.

The Edirol looks quite comparable to the 1010 (except for having phantom power and a headphone jack), and it seems to be priced about the same. For my money, I would go for the 1010, simply because it is a proven commodity. One of the most important aspects of a sound card is well written drivers. M-Audio has had it share of crappy drivers, but they now seem to have drivers that are stable and provide low latency. I don't know if that's the case with the Edirol. A/D converters are also important, and the 1010 has pretty good ones as well. I have no knowledge of the quality of the Edirol converters.

As for preamps - decent ones are not cheap. To say you'll get two now, and 6 later is probably not the most efficient use of your money. For the type of setup you are contemplating, I think a mixer is probably the way to go. That will give you all the pre-amps you need, plus a whole lot of other options as well (control room outs for speakers, headphone jacks, buses, etc.

If you can't afford the mixer now, then just go for one pre-amp - and get a good one. You can use it for vocals down the road.

 

[Porter]

cunk,

I own the Edirol. I can't compare it to the M-Audio, however for my recording I haven't had any major issues with it. The drivers seem solid, I'm not using the initial drivers off the disk that came with it, I'm running current ones off Edirols website.

As for the Pre's, when I was buying it, the guy in the store who ran his own studio (on Cubase.. but I won't start that here) said that the AD converters sounded good and the Pre's were 'warm' <-- however you take the meaning.

There are some down sides of the card which i will admit to, being that channel 1 & 2 and XLR connectors only, 3 & 4 have both front and rear inputs with the front inputs being Hi-Z for guitars/Basses. 5 & 6 inputs are only on the back, and 7/8 is optical on the front and 1/4" jacks on the back.

The ASIO Driver Control Panel is similar, if not the same as the M-Audio from what I've seen.

Unlike the Digi001 on Mac, you can have up to 4 of these cards in a PC at the one time, all synced together.

I bought mine when I purchased Sonar, I haven't looked back!

I'll also say this.. I'd recommend the Edirol, dachay2tnr would recommend the M-Audio (we both own the cards that we recommend). The M-Audio card have been recommended by quite a few people on this site. I think the reason for that is that the Edirol Da-2496 came out later, hence everyone had an M-Audio and didn't need to look around.

Summary, it is personal choice and the best we can do is offer our opinions from what we have seen/heard.

Good luck, let us know which way you go,

Porter