My thoughts regarding sound cards

[Toddskins]

I think they can be summed up like this:

If you own a laptop, go to Guitar Center with your laptop, pick out the interfaces with the features you need. Then try them out right there in front of the sales guy. If it works properly, give him the sale right then and there.


If you own a desktop, Guitar Center still has a great return policy. In any event, I recommend PCI cards, in general, due to their vastly superior speed and throughput over USB 2.0 and even Firewire 800.


Sound cards for computers are really tempermental and finnicky. You have to try them to find your favorite. Because of this, I think you owe it to give the sale to the company that services you. I do not usually say this about buying any other type of gear, except for sound cards. Sales and service are really earned on this one.

 

[Agent47]

I'm looking at getting a new sound card. But I would have problems going to a Guitar Center.

 

[dgatwood]

If you own a desktop, Guitar Center still has a great return policy. In any event, I recommend PCI cards, in general, due to their vastly superior speed and throughput over USB 2.0 and even Firewire 800.

Do you work for GC? Because this sounds like somebody trying to get rid of an overstock on PCI cards. PCI is a dead standard. It has been deprecated for years and is being actively phased out. Buying PCI cards is throwing your money away.

Bus throughput is completely irrelevant for audio recording purposes. Once you have enough bandwidth to handle the data, having extra bandwidth is not a virtue. (Well, with PCI, you would need lots of extra bandwidth because of the way PCI interfaces work, but with a serial bus like USB or FireWire, extra bandwidth is not in any way useful or relevant.)

If you'd like to learn more, I'm sure I've posted long rants on isochronous mode and why USB audio is fundamentally broken. Do a search.

Sound cards for computers are really tempermental and finnicky. You have to try them to find your favorite. Because of this, I think you owe it to give the sale to the company that services you. I do not usually say this about buying any other type of gear, except for sound cards. Sales and service are really earned on this one.

I haven't found them to be temperamental at all. Maybe it's just your machine.

 

[omtayslick]

I like PCI too. Works for me.
But I've never seen a GC that that was set up to effectively demo ANYTHING.

 

[pipelineaudio]

In practice the PCI card has a ton and a half more thru put than usb or fw

As in, you are 17.6993 trillion times more likely to PUT something safely on disk if it goes THRU a pci card

usb and fw are still buggy as all hell in so many cases, just like pci was at first.

I use a lot of fw stuff nowdays, but you have to be REALLY specific about it, and usb, is just an unworkable PITA in some cases so far for me

 

[dgatwood]

In practice the PCI card has a ton and a half more thru put than usb or fw

And in practice, each channel of your audio uses approximately 4.6 Mbit/second at 24-bit/192kHz, regardless of whether it flows over PCI or FireWire.

More to the point, in practice, a glitch on a PCI bus is just as irrecoverable as a dropped/corrupted FireWire packet due to the duration of a bus reset (a tenth of a second for PCI), so there's no possibility of using any of that extra bandwidth for recovering from any sort of glitch.

As in, you are 17.6993 trillion times more likely to PUT something safely on disk if it goes THRU a pci card

That's simply not true. FireWire uses something called isochronous transfers that guarantee(*) that the data will not be delayed in getting to your computer; short of a defective cable, a broken FireWire card, or a defective device, this means that the data always gets to your machine's RAM. Thus, your computer has exactly the same chance of dropping the ball with FireWire (reading the data out of RAM on your motherboard) as it does with a PCI card (reading data out of RAM on the audio card).

In practice, I haven't seen a single problem with any of my audio interfaces I've dealt with over the years that could be traced back in any way to the connection medium except for problems with USB hardware. That's not saying some people don't have problems, but those folks generally either have faulty FireWire cards (buggy chipsets) or faulty motherboards (buggy chipsets).

As long as you buy a TI-based card, you're at about the same risk of problems with FireWire as with PCI, as the remaining problems with FireWire are generally caused by problems with IRQ conflicts with the FireWire card, which would be fatal whether you're using a FireWire card or a PCI-based sound card in that slot.


(*) Bad cables notwithstanding, there is exactly one way to break isoch transfers and you won't ever run into it; ask me for details if you really care; it involves more than one interface and more than one computer.

 

[Toddskins]

Now who seems blind?

Do you work for GC? Because this sounds like somebody trying to get rid of an overstock on PCI cards. PCI is a dead standard. It has been deprecated for years and is being actively phased out. Buying PCI cards is throwing your money away.

Bus throughput is completely irrelevant for audio recording purposes. Once you have enough bandwidth to handle the data, having extra bandwidth is not a virtue. (Well, with PCI, you would need lots of extra bandwidth because of the way PCI interfaces work, but with a serial bus like USB or FireWire, extra bandwidth is not in any way useful or relevant.)

If you'd like to learn more, I'm sure I've posted long rants on isochronous mode and why USB audio is fundamentally broken. Do a search.




I haven't found them to be temperamental at all. Maybe it's just your machine.

It's obviously you that has your eyes shut. Just read the numerous forums on this site of people that have and had issues with audio/midi devices. Why take pot shots at me? Regarding GC, choose any retailer you like. Which company you like was not the point.

 

[pipelineaudio]

In practice, I haven't seen a single problem with any of my audio interfaces I've dealt with over the years that could be traced back in any way to the connection medium except for problems with USB hardware. That's not saying some people don't have problems, but those folks generally either have faulty FireWire cards (buggy chipsets) or faulty motherboards (buggy chipsets).

Wait till its your email that is used for a DAW's tech support and then we will talk about which one *in practice* is more likely to have problems

Im a firewire fan, but I'm fully prepared to admit that even when using manufacturer reccomended stuff, even RME, you are going to get 100 times as many emails about a fw card than a pci one

My mini mobile rig is a FW laptop. The secondary is FW on a desktop. My home and testing rig is fw on a desktop.

Using *some* mobo chipsets, with a TI fw card and a WELL made FW soundcard things go well. Many of the problem systems do fine with *some* pci cards, the inverse is not true

 

[dgatwood]

It's obviously you that has your eyes shut. Just read the numerous forums on this site of people that have and had issues with audio/midi devices. Why take pot shots at me? Regarding GC, choose any retailer you like. Which company you like was not the point.

Who took a pot shot? Certainly wasn't my intention. The comment about GC was in jest.

 

[dgatwood]

Using *some* mobo chipsets, with a TI fw card and a WELL made FW soundcard things go well. Many of the problem systems do fine with *some* pci cards, the inverse is not true

Most of the FireWire complaints I've heard about have been with crap FireWire chipsets, but I will acknowledge that some motherboard chipsets have broken BIOS settings related to PCI bus timings and the like that can make PCI FireWire cards problematic. Those same motherboards also have a reasonably poor chance of working with PCI audio cards, but you are right that with *some* subset of PCI audio cards, they might *sometimes* work usably.

None of that is the fault of FireWire, though. It has nothing to do with the speed of the bus and everything to do with a fundamentally broken motherboard that just happens to work with some cards (with severely diminished PCI bus performance).

Sometimes the phrase "Your motherboard sucks" is the right answer even if the customer doesn't want to hear that....

 

[pipelineaudio]

Yeah, Im not blaming FW in theory, just the manufacturers of 99% of the stuff we have to use in practice.