Windows 98 -- Best soundcard ?

J

johnnymegabyte

New member
What is the best soundcard that works with Windows 98SE

I HAVE SERIOUS LATENCY ISSUES on my Soundblaster
I would consider this expense to get my PC functioning in the multi-track world

So, I'm mostly thinking USED or out a while, because most current cards expenct Windows XP

So, if you take a step back to the year 2000 or 2001, what soundcards were avaialble for Win 98 and had LOW or ZERO Latency ?

How about USB ? ( however there is a Win XP requirement for all I've found. Why is this ? Aren't 98 and XP both WIN32 )
 
Windows 98 won't allow you to use WDM drivers (IIRC). You are not going to get low latency with MME drivers with most any card.

What recording app are you using? You might want to look into something that works with ASIO drivers if your recording app supports ASIO.

Going back in time, there wasn't much that gave "extremely" low latency. However, it was less an issue back then, as things like Input Monitoring were not widely available.

The way I dealt with latency back then was to use hardware monitoring directly through the sound card (still do, in fact). I think most of the better cards allowed for this (I know my Delta 1010 did).
 
Fredrikgroth said:
Windows 98 SE supports WDM drivers.
Click to expand...
I think Win98 SE might have, I don't believe the original version did. I also don't recall the implementation being very well done, and not a lot of vendors wrote WDM drivers for Win98.

This is pretty old history, but that's my recollection.
 
The latency with WDM drivers is pretty bad anyway. It's much worse than ASIO which isn't great either. Dachay2tnr is right, you need to get something with "zero-latency direct hardware monitoring" or however the interface you get words it. That way, the signal you're monitoring does not go through the software, and latency won't really be an issue.
I don't know how many soundcards/interfaces with this feature work with Windows98, I guess you'd just have to check the specs. It's pretty standard on most interaces these days.
 
Used an Aardvark Q10 for many years on 98SE. 8 inputs, good mic pres. Glitches now and then but very useable for the most part. You can find these pretty cheap on eBay. Just make sure you get the PCI card and cable with it. Worked well with Cakewalk Pro Audio 9. Drivers for Win98SE are readily available on internet for the Q10. Not from Aardvark - they shut down a couple of years back with no warning (bastards!!!!).

DD
 
In my 98SE days, I used a Yamaha DS2416. All the mixing can be done on the card, so there is zero latency, until you use VSTs. But I presume your computer is old and slow, so the DS2416 could be clever as it has 16 tracks with EQ and dynamics on every track, and 2 onboard effects, all with zero CPU usage.

Of course the card is long discontinued but there is still an online user community.
 
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