Good Affordable Sound Card

I've had PCI, USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces all on my system, and I agree USB 2.0 was the worst. The drivers worked great, but the latency was very high. I returned the interface. I've stayed with my 192 PCI card which delivers like 6ms Round trip with buffers at 256. The USB 2.0 was 4x that. Focusrite Firewire in the middle.

Not knocking USB 2.0 but I use a lot of VSTi's and need real time monitoring.
 
Aha!
It seems the KA6 DOES have an Achilles heel!

I have run some numbers on the phantom power delivery and it is distinctly poor.

Impressing pins 2 and 3 onto a 1.47k resistor should give me around 10mA (14.47V) for a ban on 48V supply. The KA6 open ciruit supply is however only 44.1V, bottom of acceptable tolerance but IN tolerance, so I should see around 9V.

But I don't, I get 3.6V one channel loaded that's just 2.44mA. Worse still, if I put the same load on the second channel I get a miserly 1.8V for a current of 1.23mA.
I am surprised my (2mA) P 150s worked as well as they did! (Note: the voltage/loading math does not compute because the raw internal "48"V generator is drooping but I cannot of course get at that to measure things)

Things are rather better with an 11.47 load on one channel for 26volts and therefore 2.26mA but again, loading the second channel with 11.47k causes a total droop to 13.6V i.e. just 1.19mA.

These tests were done on a rear USB 2.0 port on my new Asus build but I repeated them on my HP i3 laptop and they were substantially the same.
One point. The O/C USB volts was 5.1 but the KA6 dropped this to 4.67. However, turning spook juice on and off only changed that by 0.1V so it would seem that it is the internal 48V generator that is lacking and not the USB loading. However, I would like to try the KA6 on a "stiffer" 5V supply and so will cobble up a twin USB A to one B lead over the weekend (if anyone knows of such a beastie please tell me!)

A quick check with the Scarlet 8i6 showed it would deliver 46V off load and 11.7V into 2x the 1.47ks giving a smell under 8mA. Not quite up to specc' but pretty good. The price of course is the wall rat to lug (and lose/forget!) .

For my next trick I am going to build an XLR twin breakout box so that I can determine exactly what juice is being delivered to my AKGs and my Sontonics STC-2.

I still stand by the KA6 as the best AI in its price class, BY FAR, for latency, connectivity and sound quality. You just need to watch perhaps which cap' mikes you plug into it!

Dave.
 
Well Dave,

Your electronics knowledge far surpasses mine. I can only barely follow your technical posting, but did follow your ideas.

You have not tried the ESI Julia XTe which is the same price, and according to DAWbench is far superior with regard to latency. Unfortunately, you cannot try it on your laptop, but your new Asus build should be hungry for it.

http://floridamusicco.com/proddetail.asp?prod=julixte
 
Toddskins said:
Well Dave,

Your electronics knowledge far surpasses mine. I can only barely follow your technical posting, but did follow your ideas.

You have not tried the ESI Julia XTe which is the same price, and according to DAWbench is far superior with regard to latency. Unfortunately, you cannot try it on your laptop, but your new Asus build should be hungry for it.

ESI Juli@*XTE - 4 in / 4 out PCIe Audio interface with swappable I/O socket
Click to expand...

Pooh! Just measuring and a bit of arithmetic. I could larn you it in an hour!

Todd, mate! You may be labouring under a misconception? I am not looking for a replacement sound card. The PCI 2496s are quite good enough. My son needed ultra fast latency when doing some MIDI work but the card plus Cubase was well up to the task and as I said, the KA6 is equal to the 2496, probably better converters but these old ears will never tell!

I did consider the Juli@ PCIe briefly at one point. It seemed that I would struggle to find a MOBO at an affordable price with more than one PCI slot, or any at all! Fortunately this Asus came under my gaze and with the AMD 3.5G 6 core has proved a slick machine and it has TWO PCI slots!

Dave.
 
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