Sound cards

JohnPerry

Heartfeltdawn said:

^^

There are far more reports of driver issues with the entry level Focusrite soundcards on the forums I lurk in than there have been with the NI Komplete or the UR22. 

@fez

At the price point you're going in there isn't a huge difference in soundcard performance in terms of converters. It really does boil down to the drivers and how they impact on the performance. For that reason I would say to go for the NI Komplete  or the Steinberg UR22 as these are rock solid in terms of driver reliability and perform very well. 

i had a focusrite saffire 6 usb and had lots of little problems. The sound quality seemed fine. I then bought a used TC Impact Twin on here and not only did the problems disappear but there was a noticeable uptick in recording quality which i had been told would be unlikely given they were roughly in the same price bracket. Not saying you're wrong...just my experience of those two

Fez

Thanks Dave I had a nagging suspicion that might be the case and I was a bit hung up on wanting a quad core just for the more power Igor factor.

Heartfeltdawn

ecc83 said:

Re the SPL Crimson. I am always wary of "night and day" claims about sound/converter quality, there are only SO many AD-D/A chips about and you would be surprised at who uses the same ones at vastly different price points!

I have to confess tho' that I was very taken with the Crimson in the SoS review and, were I to be starting a project studio from scratch I would go for one.....EXCEPT! It has NO expandability!

WTF did they not fit ADAT???!

Dave.

@ecc83 I don't bother looking at EQ charts or anything like that, strictly ears only. At one point I had the Delta 66, Multiface 1, and the Crimson all installed on the same computer so I could easily switch between them. Each of them went out to my amplifier and monitors. The Delta 66 actually sounded good with guitar (rolled off top end) but nowhere near as good on strings and orchestras. The Multiface was brighter than the Delta 66 with a harsher top end than anything else used. The SPL is a bit darker than the Audient ID22, the nearest comparable unit, but I prefer this. 

JohnPerry said:

i had a focusrite saffire 6 usb and had lots of little problems. The sound quality seemed fine. I then bought a used TC Impact Twin on here and not only did the problems disappear but there was a noticeable uptick in recording quality which i had been told would be unlikely given they were roughly in the same price bracket. Not saying you're wrong...just my experience of those two

The Impact Twins are good units. TC gear is generally pretty good at the lower end of the price spectrum when it comes to audio. 

Fez

Komplete Audio 6 ordered. Will have to sort PC next week, still we are on the way back to home studio recording.

imalone

ecc83 said:

Fez said:

Mad but not a gamer - Thanks I will pass that on to my expert PC man.

FYI I got an AMD FX-6300 6core 3.5G CPU with the deal. The proc' does not support hyperthreading. Not sure what that is about but the whole PC seems bloody quick. Been on all day now and the cores are still only at 27C.

Dave.

Hyperthreading is an intel thing, AMD wont have it. It's kind of multitasking on the CPU, don't think it will help much in audio processing once you're already multi-core. A single core shows up as two virtual cores (allowing more independent threads in play), but they can't actually execute at the same time.
(I'm supposed to be figuring out how to benchmark AMD against Intel for some image processing we do. Would be straightforward, except we don't have the AMD system we're considering and there are limits on how much can be run on the machines we already have other than the processor speed.)

imalone

imalone said:

ecc83 said:

Fez said:

Mad but not a gamer - Thanks I will pass that on to my expert PC man.

FYI I got an AMD FX-6300 6core 3.5G CPU with the deal. The proc' does not support hyperthreading. Not sure what that is about but the whole PC seems bloody quick. Been on all day now and the cores are still only at 27C.

Dave.

Hyperthreading is an intel thing, AMD wont have it. It's kind of multitasking on the CPU, don't think it will help much in audio processing once you're already multi-core. A single core shows up as two virtual cores (allowing more independent threads in play), but they can't actually execute at the same time.
(I'm supposed to be figuring out how to benchmark AMD against Intel for some image processing we do. Would be straightforward, except we don't have the AMD system we're considering and there are limits on how much can be run on the machines we already have other than the processor speed.)

Should anyone care about the hyperthreading thing... for non-linear spline-based registration in medical imaging it turns out to be counter-productive. We've got some 2x6 core Xeon systems, hyperthreading means this appears as 24 virtual cores, running enough multithreaded registrations at once to push it into hyperthreading (basically, >12 active threads, the system thinks it can have 24) I see a definite performance hit. This may be an unusual use case though as very processor intensive while using large chunks of active memory.

Fez

Computer & interface Kore audio 6 arrived. Now set up waiting for my mate to put the old hard drive in. Only bummer so far is my key rig 25 isn't windows 7 compatible. 

ecc83

"bummer so far is my key rig 25 isn't windows 7 compatible."

Don't knock it till you've tried it! The 25 had Vista drivers, might work but if all else fails use DIN in DIN out to the interface. You will still be able to power the Korg via USB.

Dave.

Fez

Err what Korg? M-Audio Keyrig25 I think you might be right about the midi route as the keyboard powered up from USB so taking a Din to the Kore audio might work. I will look at the vista drivers though - might be worth a shot.

I'm not a big keyboard player but it is nice to have and £50-60 gets a win7 compatible replacement.

wave100

With a bit of luck your keyboard should be class compliant and therefore work in Win7 without any other drivers - most of them are. Plug it in and see!

Fez

Plugged it in no go. Tried midi too still no worky. It will get replaced in the fullness of time but no rush as it's only a nice to have for me.