Digitally coupling SB Live and Echo Mia

B

Bergen

Member
I've been reading a lot about people coupling their SB Live and Mia soundcards. I have the SB Live with the piggyback digital I/O card with SPDIF I/O RCA outputs. It seems logical that you could digitally couple the cards, so soundfonts can be processed by mia D/A converters only producing better sound quality. However, a concern I have with this is that I've heard the SB Live proprietary mixer does not work with both cards installed, and use of the default windows mixer is recommended. I don't believe the SPDIF I/O's are controlled through the windows mixer. Has anyone tried this or have any advice on how to do this?

I had one additional idea that I'm not sure has any merit. I'm going to be using an MXL 990 with an AudioBuddy preamp, and since I'm the only musician I record, I won't be needing a mixer. I'd like to monitor my recordings with headphones, but don't want to buy a headphone preamp. I was hoping that routing the digital out from mia to digital in on sb live will allow me to monitor sounds through the sb live headphone output. To hear 24/96 through mia, I thought I might try sending the analog audio out from mia through the audiobuddy to act as a preamp for my headphones. I was also curious if I could use 1 input on the audiobuddy for a mic and the other for headphones while recording without introducing feedback loops. I'm interested if anyone has tried this or has any insight if this will work? thanks
 
It seems logical that you could digitally couple the cards, so soundfonts can be processed by mia D/A converters only producing better sound quality.
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There's little point in doing this. All you need to do is record the Sound Fonts to audio using the SB's internal WAV device and the quality will be identical to whatever you would get by transferring via the S/PDIF port and recording with the Mia -- there's no conversion going on here when you record, the Sound Font device is already inside the card. It's easier and you don't tie up the Mia's digital port.
 
AlChuck said:


All you need to do is record the Sound Fonts to audio using the SB's internal WAV device and the quality will be identical to whatever you would get by transferring via the S/PDIF port and recording with the Mia --

thank you for the reply. I'm assuming you're referring to that 32-bit function of the SB
Live can convert midi files to wav files at 32 bit resolution. However, I may not always want to immediately convert midi to audio in a project to ease future editing (piano roll editing, changing soundfonts) and to decrease cpu load(does playing the track back as midi vs. wav file require less resources?). I would convert to wav format then just before adding any audio effects and final mixdown. In this case, I might want to use both my analog ins for recording in a multitrack project that has midi files that I would want to hear while recording. So in this situation, would digital coupling be a good idea? Also, might there be latency issues with this? thanks
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If you run the outputs of the SB Live and the Mia to a mixer and drive the monitors from that, then you can leave the Sound Fonts as MIDI files just like you said. No digital coupling necessary.
 
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