M-Audio comparison

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Middleman

Middleman

Professional Amateur
Anyone familiar with the ADDA convertors on the following M-Audio products?:

Delta 1010
Delta 66
Delta 44
Delta 410
Delta 1010LT
Audiophile 2496

Just trying to understand which might have the best performance for the lowest cost. I only record 2 tracks at a time so other specs are not as critical. Also do not need a breakout box as I use an external mixer.

Not sure where the 410, Audiophile and the 1010LT fit in against the rest. I am sure that no one has all of these but if you can compare one against another then I can compile the results.
 
the 44,66,1010, and Audiophile have AKM converters for sure.....

the Audiophile has the AKM AK4528 for AD and DA

the 1010 has AK5383 for AD and AK4393's for DA.....

the 44 and 66 have AK 4524 for AD and DA
 
Thanks Gidge.

I am adding your data to mine and surmising the 1010 LT is using the same AKM chip as the Delta 410. The reason being that the published specs for both cards is the same. This would be the AKM 4529.

Delta 1010 AKM AK4393VF
High dynamic range (A-weighted measured): D/A 108db, A/D 109db.
Low distortion (measured THD @0dBFS): D/A less than 0.0015%, A/D less than 0.001%.1
22Hz - 22kHz, -0.3,-0.2dB
AKM 5383's for A/D
4393's for D/A

Delta 66
Measured D/A specs: 103dB (A-weighted) dynamic range, 0.0015% THD @ 0dBFS.
Measured A/D specs: 99dB (A-weighted) dynamic range, 0.0023% THD @ 0dBFS.
22Hz - 22kHz, -0.3,-0.2dB
Converter AD/DA AK4524

Delta 44
Measured D/A specs: 103dB (A-weighted) dynamic range, 0.0015% THD @ 0dBFS.
Measured A/D specs: 99dB (A-weighted) dynamic range, 0.0023% THD @ 0dBFS.
22Hz - 22kHz, -0.3,-0.2dB
Converter AD/DA AK4524

Delta 410
High dynamic range (A-weighted measured): D/A 101.5 dB, A/D 99.6 dB.
Low distortion (measured THD @ 0dBFS): A/D and D/A less than 0.002%.
Frequency Response:22-22kHz, -0.2,-0.4dB @48kHz 22-40kHz, -0.2,-0.7dB @96kHz
AK4529

Delta 1010LT
High dynamic range (A-weighted measured): D/A 101.5 dB, A/D 99.6 dB.
Low distortion (measured THD @ 0dBFS): A/D and D/A less than 0.002%.
Frequency Response: 22-22kHz, -0.2,-0.4dB @48kHz; 22-40kHz, -0.2,-0.7dB @96kHz
AK4529????? I am assuming this

Audiophile 2496 Dynamic Range: D/A 104.0dB (a-weighted), A/D 100.4dB (a-weighted)
• THD: less than 0.002%
• Freq. Response: 22Hz - 22kHz, -0.4,-0.4dB
AKM AK4528

So the audiophile is slightly lower in Freq Resp at 96 i.e. 22H-22kH than the 410 or the 1010LT.

The 66, 44 and Audiophile 2496 have the same frequency response with a slightly higher dynamic range on the Audiophile 2496.

The 1010 has the highest Dynamic range but same frequency response as the 66, 44 and Audiophile.

These are published ratings of course. So do I go for Dynamic range or frequency response?

Also, anyone who might have heard two or more of these cards care to comment on the subjective sound quality?
 
I seriously doubt you'll notice the difference either way at that end of the gear spectrum.... after all, you're not comparing these to Apogees or Lucids!

Bruce
 
I record in the same manner as you, though I have not compared quality of the named cards, I use the audiophile which was the cheapest price wise and I have no complaints. Then again Im not a producer or engineer, just a musician, and the card works great for my needs.
 
Blue Bear Sound said:
I seriously doubt you'll notice the difference either way at that end of the gear spectrum.... after all, you're not comparing these to Apogees or Lucids!
Click to expand...

Very true. We're merely looking for ways to stretch our dollar rather than shrink it or throw it away.
 
delta 1010, hands down its insanely good. and since it goes for oodles cheaper than the lucid i would recommend it for most people. CyanJaguar did a shootout a while ago, lucid vs delta1010. it was an eye opener, i could hear a more present bass on the lucid, but that was ONLY with a seperate clock. so you were looking at 2x the price of a delta 1010 for 2 channels of A/D and a clock. And thats IT! the delta is MUCH better value for money.

And the lucid on its own with its innternal clock was quite a sorry comparison, it lost in pitiful fashion. Now of course, if you have enough for a clock and a $4000 to spend in converters, you could have 8 in 8 out and clocked in well with Lucid, or you could stick with the delta1010 for $500.

With that $3500, you can go a LONG way to sounding better than the Lucid guy with cheap mics and prosummer pre amps.
 
$2K + a/d converters:

. . . the biggest scam ever to hit the pro audio industry?

. . . or is it just $1,500 for a $10 improvement in audio quality.

At least on the lower end of the scale, the improvements you might get in audio quality are comensurate with price.
 
kristian said:
CyanJaguar did a shootout a while ago, lucid vs delta1010. it was an eye opener . . . the delta is MUCH better value for money.

And the lucid on its own with its innternal clock was quite a sorry comparison, it lost in pitiful fashion.
Click to expand...

Food for thought.
 
I also have a few questions about whether or not those specs can actually be met _in practice_ on any system-resident sound card. I used to own an Audiophile 2496, and ended up retiring it and going to a Flying Cow simply to get the converters outside the CPU cabinet: the noise floor drove me nuts.

The best S/N I could ever achieve with the Audiophile was about 85dB in my system- a *far cry* from the specified 104dB. Worse yet, the noise floor was completely dominated by pitched wheezes and intermittent burbly noises that exactly tracked bus/disk activity.

Now, it's possible that I just have a very noisy system (ASUS CUSL2C, 800MHz PIII, bigs SCSI disks, rack mount cabinet). But the only way that the Audiophile would ever have cracked 90dB dynamic range in use would have been *with the processor halted*. You didn't ask for this opinion, but I believe that any soundcard that does not relocate its converters into a breakout box (or use some other mechanism to isolate them from system EMI) will have a very hard time getting anywhere near 100dB dynamic range.

The Flying Cow I replaced it with is actually capable of achieving an honest 103dB dynamic range in my system, and the noise floor is the pinkish semiconductor/thermal noise you'd hope for- not pitched digital noise. Now, the Cow is a very modest product- it's nowhere near as good as any of the top-end standalone converters. But it's good enough for me, and it is demonstrably better than the Audiophile was in my system.

Caveat emptor, and watch out for specsmanship: actually *achieving* over 100dB dynamic range is damned hard in practice.
 
I wish I had 100db noise floor in my appartment. The PC fans alone put an end to that - even in the closet.
 
So Skippy how does that flying cow interface to the computer?

Is there an audible difference in the sound quality?
 
It has S/PDIF I/O, so I connect to my RME Hammerfall card's S/PDIF ports. I then use the ADAT ports on the Hammerfall to talk to my Fostex D1624 16-track.

And yes, it made a very definite difference in the sound quality, primarily because I found the pitched artifacts that drove that higher noise floor to be pretty much intolerable. I used the Audiophile primarily for monitoring the DAW's software mixer, and that wheezy noise floor just irritated the *heck* out of me: I couldn't tell if the noise floor was due to the monitoring chain, some broken effects box, or the track itself. Going to the external converters dropped the noise floor nearly 20dB, and changed the character of the noise from pitched to a very neutral broadband pink. Maybe most folks wouldn't notice that, or care- but I certainly did... Your mileage may vary.

The very few tracks I recorded through the A/D side of the Audiophile (instead of the Fostex converters) do indeed have that wheezy stuff embedded in them forever- silent spaces, or note decays, trail off into "wzzzzzeeeblblblrrrrzzzz" instead of "ssssssss". I've rerecorded most of them now.

My point is not that the Cow is a great converter box: it's arguably not that good at all, by comparison to many other products. However, I found that it provided an overall advantage in a system sense over the Audiophile. Adequate converters in an electrically quiet environment can produce better results than good converters that are run in the terrible environment that exists inside a computer box. So regardless of which way you go, it is my belief that you will do better with a product that locates its A/D and D/A converters in an external breakout box of some type, ideally with its own separate power supply.

Just one more data point: I also measured the residual noise of the internal converters in my D1624, and in the AC2496 external 8-channel converter box I used to be able to track 16 at once. The internal converters have a noise floor at -100.2dBFS, and the external converters in the AC2496 have a noise floor of -107.8dBFS.

Here's the neat part: the converters are the *exact same circuit design*, but inside the D1624 they share their power supplies and electrical environment with the little Pentium machine that formats and writes the data onto the EIDE hard drive the recorder uses. The external box does *not* have all that other junk in it, so its noise floor is significantly lower.

The good news is that the D1624's noise floor isn't very distracting at all- it doesn't warble or change timbres noticeably as the bus activity changes, and is much more closely akin to neutral pink noise. It doesn't bother me even when the gains are cranked... But your mileage may vary.

Just listen carefully to the noise floor of any product you buy: you'll be doing that a lot for as long as you own it...
 
The Audiophile

As an Audiophile owner (I own Skippy's formerly "retired" card) and a home recording hobbyist I hope you'll allow me to interject my perspective here.

I love my Audiophile, but several qualifications apply: 1) As I said, I'm a hobbyist and neither my ears nor my technical "specsman's" chops are anywhere near those of the other participants in this discussion (they don't need to be, at least not yet); 2) I bought the Audiophile as much for it's low latency WDM drivers for use in SONAR as I did for it's improvement in sound vs. my SBLive.

So, that said, I am inferring from Middleman's post (perhaps incorrectly) that he will be using his card in a home environment, and not in a professional capacity. If that is indeed the case then I can highly recommend the Audiophile. The other line of Delta cards will allow the user to record more than 2 tracks at a time (actually you can do 4 simultaneously with the Audiophile using the SPDIF ports), and perhaps the improvement in dynamic range that you get from the 1010 is what you're looking for, but for $179 (or a lot less--Thanks Skip!) the Audiophile is mighty hard to beat for the home enthusiast. I also can't say enough good things about using the WDM drivers for low latency input monitoring: it's just a wonderful thing to have to play with.

Also, as said I'm sure my ears aren't of the caliber of Skip's, but I think I would notice, and be pissed off by, a wheezing sound in my recordings (Skip, was this a sound that was noticeable to everyone who heard recordings made using this card?). I don't hear anything like that with my DAW using his old Audiophile.

-Reqs
 
don't let me derail your discussion, but I didn't want to start a new post for such a minor, related question....

Latency differences aside, if you ran strictly at 16 bits/44.1 KHz, would you still expect a noticeable improvement using an Audiophile over an SB? Or is all it's advantageousness wrapped up in bit depth, sample rate, and processing latency improvements?

thanks much
 
Well, as I said: I may just have a very noisy system. That's starting to sound more and more like the culprit here... But yes, it was quite noticeable when monitoring on my monitors at my usual comfortable monitoring levels (~85dB SPL). It was what I heard at the end of every note decay or reverb tail, and it irritated the _heck_ out of me. As an old analog guy, I want to hear things decay into broadband tape hiss, not into anything pitched. And since I do a lot of quiet acoustic music, that was a major annoyance to me: enough to make me replace the card with something else, and sell it to you at fire-sale rates... (;-)

However, I do notice the fact that I'm the only one who has ever reported this phenomenon- so everyone reading this should weigh that as well! I'm glad the Audiophile is working well for you, and it may just be a property of your system being dramatically quieter electrically than mine. And no, it wasn't something that bothered most people who listened to recordings made with it, or even who sat and listened while I mixed: they were listening to the music only, whereas I was listening to both the music and the signal path. Comes with the territory: it's like seeing the reel-change cue dots on the print at a movie theatre, if you were once a projectionist. You can't _stop_ seeing them.

I'm really pretty demanding on my system- probably far more so than any home recordist really _needs_ to be. That's just baggage from my misspent youth, I think. That, and the fact that I seem to have people wanting to pay me to bring projects in, whether I like it or not... (;-) And if the specs say one thing and the unit does another, that gets my attention.

You know, it'd be really instructive if you could measure the noise floor of that card as installed in your system! If it's down in the -90dBFS range, I'll change my tune on that card, and start slagging off the motherboard instead. But 6 months of working on card location in the cage, correcting grounding faults, and generally beating on the DAW didn't solve the problem for me. I hate specsmanship, and that's what it looked like to me.

Your mileage may vary, so definitely scale my comments with the understanding that I'm basically pretty demanding. I can't stand the sound of digital noise, any more than I can stand the sound of 60Hz hums that creep in through ground loops, or that little tweedle of AM radio from that one cold solderjoint in the patchbay that is acting as a crude detector... I want _silence_, or at least broadband noise, and I'm not going to stop until I get it. (;-)

But the central idea is absolutely true: You'll be monitoring through whatever you choose to buy for a long time to come, so make absolutely sure that what you hear is what you _want_ to hear!
 
And I thank you again for the bargain card!

Yes, it sounds like you are very demanding in terms of perfomance and sound. I'm sure I'm not there yet but I definitely think I'd hear a pitched noise.

RE. measuring my noise floor: I was thinking of that very same thing but I don't know that I've got the gear to do it. How is this done?
 
I forget what resolution and range the meters have in the M-audio control panel, but I do recall that you can do some metering in there.

I never used them, though. I did my initial measurements with a program called "digicheck", which comes with the RME Hammerfall card. That allows you to look at the bit streams on any of the Hammerfall's ADAT or S/PDIF ports, and gives you very high resolution, and a range that extends right down to the LSB. It's a *great* tool for system debug and chasing gremlins- that's exactly what it is intended for.

The way I used it was to run the bit stream from the Audiophile's S/PDIF out to the Hammerfall: that let me measure the residual input noise on the Audiophile's A/D converters. I did that 3 ways: with the input routed to the mixer with faders down, with the input open but routed to the patch bay, and with the input shorted (so I could tell if my noise source was the mixer, the patchbay wiring, or internal to the card). To check the output residual, I then connected it up as a loopback: the Audiophile's analog outputs were looped back to its inputs, using its A/D converters to try to measure the noise that was riding on the D/A's outputs. It was an interesting exercise.

Later, after I got the Terrasonde, I measured the output noise on the analog outs directly with that as well, just as a sanity check. If you have a sensitive AC millivoltmeter or a scope, you can also directly measure the output and convert units. -90dBFS on that unit should be about 400uV rms or 1mV p-p, -75dBFS would be about 2mV rms or 6mV p-p. It's hard to do measurement of this precision without having the right gear, though: that far down, these are very small signals, and measurement technique very definitely comes into play.

See if the Audiophile's control panel metering is of any use here- it might be, it might not. Having digicheck made it very easy. But maybe the bottom line should be: if it isn't annoying you, don't worry about it!
 
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