Digital Drive

Posted by Gordon Rankin (M) on October 25, 2009 at 12:00:28

In Reply to: RE: Some thoughts on async etc. posted by John Swenson on October 24, 2009 at 15:23:20

John,

Thanks for filling in what I often forget to!

Actually the Musicland and EMU are pretty different. The Musicland uses the Cypress dummy device driver and .NET wrapper to implement the Device interface. See Cypress developed a dummy device driver that will work with any of it's 2.0 controllers. They also give you the .NET code to implement what every interface you want. Then put the wrapper around the .NET to make it look like a sound card.

The one problem with using Bulk mode is that there is no guarantee of delivery because it has such a low priority. Whereas Isosynchronous has the highest priority and therefore best avenue for audio.

The EMU 0404 was developed by Markus Medau of Ploytec. Basically it uses his Windows driver and MAC driver but really it is a USB Class 2 device hidden and associated with some standard interfaces so if you don't use the device driver it will show up as a standard 24/96 device. Markus also did the Tascam piece and some other async units. We talk often about stuff like this.

I totally agree with your comments on the SPDIF XLR. I didn't say it would not work either, I just think there are better ways and connectors to do it on.

Thanks
Gordon
J. Gordon Rankin