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In Reply to: Re: Is a Sound Card Upgrade worthwhile? posted by aljordan on October 23, 2006 at 12:16:17:
The MAudio is a mediocre card does does not give you the best. Go for an RME or Lynx. Cheap cards are just a way of dripping money, in the long run.MAudio is known for driver problems, and I have come across these. Poor support as well.
Follow Ups:
I am using M-Audio DIO2496 cards or many years and they seem to work extremely well.The ASIO driver provide for bit tranparent digital output, they automatically switch between DD/DTS movie tracks and any supported PC bitrate and as a bonus you can play WAV and ASIO in parallel.
My second bets choice would be the ESI-pro Juli@. I can't see alot of value buying a sound card with
Cheers
Fmak said: "The MAudio is a mediocre card does does not give you the best. Go for an RME or Lynx. Cheap cards are just a way of dripping money, in the long run.MAudio is known for driver problems, and I have come across these. Poor support as well."
The above is from a guy who, if memory serves me correctly, has a DCS DAC that cost more than my car. I use an M-Audio 24/96 card with no problems. Also in the same price range is Terretec 2496 and Emu 0404.I also use the Terretec with no problems. Just ordered a Emu 0404, havn't received it yet. I'm sure all of these would be a decent step up from Creative.
Enjoy,
The M-Audio cards I have used (internal PCI) worked flawlessly with both MME and ASIO 2.0 drivers under Windows XP, as well as with the ALSA Envy24 drivers / low latency JACK server / real-time kernel module under Linux. I have used the cards for both music playback and multi-track recording under both operating systems without problems.M-Audio may well be mediocre compared to the Lynx and RME products. I can't say because I haven't compared them directly (yet). I don't particularly care for the sound of the M-Audio internal DACs, but I do like the sound of the internal ADCs, particularly when recording at 96Khz and using libsamplerate to down sample to 44.1. The DACs are, however, better sounding than the Creative cards and include much better ASIO driver support.
If a person is not ready to spend six hundred to one thousand dollars on a sound card, I think reasonably good results can be had for the seventy five dollar street price of the M-Audio 24/96; particularly if, as in ArdRi's case, only the digital output will be used instead of the internal DACs. I'll have a better opinion in a couple days because I just ordered a LynxTwo. I'll be able to compare the two directly and return the Lynx if it does not offer a noticable improvement.
I have compared the M Audio with Terratec2496, RME96/8, LynxAES16 using spdif output. The MAudio (Audiophile????????) is poor in comparison, with ASIO driver issues. Next is Terratec but this is robust. The RME and Lunx are good both soundwise and technically (I measure waveform integrity and can do all the other things.)
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