PCI Interface Question..

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Scoobydooby

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Hey guys.. quick question.

I'm thinking of purchasing a new delta 1010lt, but was wondering if its primarily a production card, or if it can be used for all around audio in a computer, like a creative card. I have an audigy atm, but if I get the delta I need to remove it and let the delta use the pci slot I have available then..

will I still be able to use the delta as a multimedia card? so that I can still watch movies and listen to my mp3s and stuff?? If so, where do i plug in the speakers as I've looked at the card and it doesn't appear to have a mini out..

Thanks!
 
The delta cards can definitely be used for other multimedia tasks. However, the L/R (1/2) outputs are separate 1/4" jacks. They can be connected directly to powered monitors that will accept a 1/4" cable, or you can route them to a mixer or distribution amp. I use a Presonus HP4 headphone amp for routing with my delta 66 cards, as it allows me to connect my monitors and up to 4 pairs of headphones or computer speakers.
 
awesome! thanks for the headsup!

I will look to grab this card then :)
 
I would caution that PCI is on its way out in favor of the (completely incompatible) PCI Express (PCIe) standard. IMHO, you are much better off spending $20 on a FireWire card and buying a FireWire interface. That way, in a couple of years, when you find yourself unable to get new motherboards wth PCI, all you've lost is $20 for the FireWire card (rather than a couple hundred for an audio card).

Some manufacturers have already dropped legacy parallel PCI. If you ever moved to the Mac platform, for example, you'd have a choice of replacing that Delta 1010 with something else or buying a Mac that's several years old. Other manufacturers have plans to phase it out over a small number of years.

Even if you do get a motherboard with legacy parallel PCI, you will likely start seeing it provided by a PCIe to PCI bus bridge, the latency performance of which may not be sufficient for existing audio cards that were not designed to handle this. The reason for this is that Intel is also slowly phasing out parallel PCI support in their chipsets.
 
pci was dead like 2 years ago according to the techies. pci is still king of the hill for now.
 
Well my mainboard right now is the asus p5n32-e sli.. I have a dual boot setup with vista on one drive and xp and all of my sound apps and samples on another.
I'm sure that for the time being using the delta 1010 would be sufficient for what I do, considering that I'd only be using it to input a mic and my keyboard, along with the midi capability. Otherwise, I'm using mostly VST through Cubase..

I have a pretty fast machine, and will be going Quad Core come july.. currently I have a 6600 oced to 3.2ghz.
What kinda latency can I expect with the Delta 1010lt?? Can't be any worse than the card I have now..

I would just go RME, but tbh, I need to up my vid card a bit more. The gtxs aren't cheap yknow :)
 
Scoobydooby said:
What kinda latency can I expect with the Delta 1010lt?? Can't be any worse than the card I have now..
Click to expand...

my home machine has a 1010lt and my safe buffer setting is about 6 ms or 12 ms roundtrip. i can half that for playing through a drum vsti realtime but with more than a few tracks and plugins i get glitches at that setting. i haven't used centrance yet to check the actual roundtrip latency but i did run some tests. i'll dig up the results and post them here for you.
 
sweet.. thanks engine joe! All in all you happy with the card?? It looks decent for what I'll need it for.
Thanks for all the help guys!
 
Scoobydooby said:
sweet.. thanks engine joe! All in all you happy with the card?? It looks decent for what I'll need it for.
Thanks for all the help guys!
Click to expand...

it's a good value for the money if you need 8 ins/outs and don't mind unbalanced connections. don't plan on making use of the two onboard mic preamps. the preamp gain isn't adjustable and they don't sound very good. you'll need a snake to get from the 1010lt's rca breakout to your preamps or mixer and two xlr adapters for the first two inputs. add the price of cabling to the 1010lt's price. if you really don't need 8 ins/outs, consider the delta 66. 4 balanced ins/outs with a convenient breakout box that can be placed nearby. i've also seen many 1010's (not lt) sell for around $300 used. something to think about.

performance wise the 1010lt has been pretty solid here. it won't hold you back from making good recordings and it works fine for everyday audio chores. the only thing i don't like about it is the rca unblanced connections on the breakout cable. rca connections come loose easily and the labels are hard to read behind a pc tower.

roundtrip latency at 256 samples had a real world latency of about 18ms.
 
engine joe said:
performance wise the 1010lt has been pretty solid here. it won't hold you back from making good recordings and it works fine for everyday audio chores. the only thing i don't like about it is the rca unblanced connections on the breakout cable. rca connections come loose easily and the labels are hard to read behind a pc tower.

roundtrip latency at 256 samples had a real world latency of about 18ms.
Click to expand...

Wow. That's insanely high latency for PCi. Round trip latency on most FireWire interfaces is in the ballpark of 8 or 9 ms (at least on the Mac platform), IIRC. A round trip of 18 ms is high even for USB. And this is a PCI card? Do their drivers just really, really suck?

Wait... it's M-Audio. Of course their drivers really, really suck.... I had just about repressed those nightmares and there you go bringing it up again.... :D
 
dgatwood said:
Wow. That's insanely high latency for PCi. Round trip latency on most FireWire interfaces is in the ballpark of 8 or 9 ms (at least on the Mac platform), IIRC. A round trip of 18 ms is high even for USB. And this is a PCI card? Do their drivers just really, really suck?

Wait... it's M-Audio. Of course their drivers really, really suck.... I had just about repressed those nightmares and there you go bringing it up again.... :D
Click to expand...

18 ms result was at 48k sample rate and 256 samples. i had the same response when i saw the results: wow.

it would be interesting to see the results of a higher end interface.
 
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engine joe said:
18 ms result was at 48k sample rate and 256 samples. i had the same response when i saw the results: wow.

it would be interesting to see the results of a higher end interface. here is the method that was used:

- Set your sequencer to software monitoring.
- Start an empty project without any plugins running.
- Setup a stereo track, set it to input monitoring.
- Connect your left output to the right input straight away (if possible, use a single cable, so no outboard gear is blurring up the results).
- Connect something sending out a signal to the left input. A single cable with a plain jack might do. You need to record something with a clear attack, so touching the tip of the jack wih something such as a screwdriver would most likely be a good idea. But virtually anything will do, you just need a clearly identifyable attack.
- Record a bit on that stereo track while "clicking".
- Compare the offset of the recorded clicks in the left and the right channels (the right channel will be the delayed "software monitored" one). This offset will be your total system latency.
Click to expand...

That's not necessarily the total round trip latency. If your software is even half decent, that offset should be approximately zero. The audio app should be able to get very close to knowing the latency of the system and should slide the track back by that amount when recording. It's called latency compensation. Any multitrack app should do it. If you're using some cheap two-track app, then yes, it probably won't compensate for that, in whcih case that might really be the RTL, but.....

If you're seeing an 18 msec. shift when doing that test, either your recording software, your drivers, or ASIO sucks (and possibly all of the above). That's pretty extreme.
 
dgatwood said:
That's not necessarily the total round trip latency. If your software is even half decent, that offset should be approximately zero. The audio app should be able to get very close to knowing the latency of the system and should slide the track back by that amount when recording. It's called latency compensation. Any multitrack app should do it. If you're using some cheap two-track app, then yes, it probably won't compensate for that, in whcih case that might really be the RTL, but.....

If you're seeing an 18 msec. shift when doing that test, either your recording software, your drivers, or ASIO sucks (and possibly all of the above). That's pretty extreme.
Click to expand...

posted the wrong test! at least i know someone is reading this stuff. offset was 8 samples.

(removing the test from my last post)
 
well 8 sounds a bit better.. and by a bit I mean a lot :)

Yeah EJ, I was looking at the D66 for a card, but I noticed that it doesn't have any midi i/o, and I want to use my MS2000 to control, so the 1010lt is a sale for me based on that almost alone. If it can let me input my mic and guitar and get at least a decent enough tone then I'l be happy, since I'll primarily be writing more electronic music with some guitar and vocal elements as well.

I'm not too worried that the connections are unbalanced to be honest.. you get what you pay for, and I'd much sooner cheap out now and only get what I need than splurge and find that I really didn't need to spend that sorta cash.

Latency I doubt will be a huge issue for me.. even if the card rose above 15ms It wouldn't be much bother to me.
 
Scoobydooby said:
well 8 sounds a bit better.. and by a bit I mean a lot :)

Yeah EJ, I was looking at the D66 for a card, but I noticed that it doesn't have any midi i/o, and I want to use my MS2000 to control, so the 1010lt is a sale for me based on that almost alone. If it can let me input my mic and guitar and get at least a decent enough tone then I'l be happy, since I'll primarily be writing more electronic music with some guitar and vocal elements as well.

I'm not too worried that the connections are unbalanced to be honest.. you get what you pay for, and I'd much sooner cheap out now and only get what I need than splurge and find that I really didn't need to spend that sorta cash.

Latency I doubt will be a huge issue for me.. even if the card rose above 15ms It wouldn't be much bother to me.
Click to expand...

8 samples is the offset i measured with the 1010lt, not 8 ms latency. i think you'll be happy enough with the 1010lt.
 
engine joe said:
8 samples is the offset i measured with the 1010lt, not 8 ms latency. i think you'll be happy enough with the 1010lt.
Click to expand...

Yep, I got that :) As mentioned, even above 10ms latency is fine with me.. so long as its better than the 43ms that I deal with now, I can't see it being problematic.

Thanks again to all you guys for all the info and opinions. I'll be grabbing this unit sometime today hopefully. (go ebay!)
 
Hey guys, one more quick question and then I'l stop being a pain.

As I mentioned before, I dual boot, so naturally working with Xp shouldn't be an issue, but what about with Vista? On the m-audio website I see no drivers for Vista. Does that mean that I'm gonna lose sound on my Vista partition?? Cuz that would suck majorly.
 
Scoobydooby said:
Hey guys, one more quick question and then I'l stop being a pain.

As I mentioned before, I dual boot, so naturally working with Xp shouldn't be an issue, but what about with Vista? On the m-audio website I see no drivers for Vista. Does that mean that I'm gonna lose sound on my Vista partition?? Cuz that would suck majorly.
Click to expand...

Probably. Another reason not to get an M-Audio interface. Their drivers are pretty awful. Worse, judging from history on both Windows and Mac, the drivers won't be stable/reliable for months after they do ship them. If you're even thinking about using Vista, I would not recommend M-Audio gear under any circumstances.

By contrast, MOTU had Vista drivers shipping back before Vista even shipped. :D
 
dgatwood said:
judging from history on both Windows and Mac, the drivers won't be stable/reliable for months after they do ship them
Click to expand...

something to think about scooby. no driver, no worky.
 
dgatwood said:
Probably. Another reason not to get an M-Audio interface. Their drivers are pretty awful. Worse, judging from history on both Windows and Mac, the drivers won't be stable/reliable for months after they do ship them. If you're even thinking about using Vista, I would not recommend M-Audio gear under any circumstances.

By contrast, MOTU had Vista drivers shipping back before Vista even shipped. :D
Click to expand...

Whatever. Did you hear that from someone that once talked to someone that had talked to someone else again?

The delta series cards are ROCK solid under windows. I ditched my Tascam TDIF cards in favor for delta TDIFs and have been using those with NO PROBLEMS whatsoever for close to 5 years and spanning 3 different computers. Prior to that I had been using delta 66's, no problems either. They are an excellent value and solid performers and I would recommend them anytime (as would most of the ppl on this board who have actually use them)

And back to the orginal post: Yes you can use the delta card for most windows duties BUT bear in mind that it may not support fancy video games sound schemes since it is not generally geared for this. I had only experienced a handful of glitches at most and all were a result of games and having two apps trying to use the sound card at once. That being said, you should have no problem using the Delta and another sound card at the same time. I use my Realtek onboard sound card for all my non-recording related duties and it plays just fine with the Delta
 
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