The Best Soundcard for SAW

[Soverign State]

What's the best sound card to use with SawStudio? Any suggestions?

[Carey Langille]

Any of the RME Cards are Excellent!!

[Soverign State]

Thanks.................................I'll check them out.

[Perry]

The 2 main choices as far as I know are the various RME cards and the Mixtreme 192 cards from Sydec.

http://www.sydec.be/ http://www.sydec.be/Products/Details/?ID=bff3368f-c161-4c9b-ab3d-779666748d56

http://www.rme-audio.com/english/index.htm

I use (and recommend) the Mixtreme cards for SAWStudio myself and they've worked extremely well for me... very, very vesatile, plus you get the exclusive DWave drivers that some (including myself) report as having excellent stability and smoothness with SAWStudio.

For the moment at least the DWave driver is *only* available with the Sydec products. There's a recent thread here on the forum where this is discussed.

The Mixtreme card also has on-board DSP that can be used to power it's own "real-time" digital mixer. The mixer can be user configured in an almost endless fashion, with all parameters capable of being saved as pre-sets.

Or, it can be configured as a simple, straight I/O card if that's what's needed. As well, the DSP can be used for powering Mixtreme's own native "real-time" plug-ins. These can be used for monitoring purposes while recoding, or you can record through them on the way in if desired.

These two cards are different and offer different pluses and minuses. Check them both out and compare features against your needs.

There are of course a few other choices as well, and others may want to jump in with recommendations for these, but the 2 listed here are representative of the top choices in my opinion and are known to work well with SAWStudio.

All the best,

Perry

[TotalSonic]

I'll second Perry's advice -
the best choices to me are either RME Hammerfall DSP or Sydec Mixtreme 192.

Everything else doesn't have as low of possible latency, as wide of driver support, or as nice of virtual routing. Get one of those 2 and you'll have a happening SAW rig.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[Carl G.]

Well... for studio production (no live recordings) I like the LynxOne.. 2 channel analog / 2 channel digital.
(but I don't know what the latency is).
Carl G.

[TotalSonic]

I also have a Lynx One for my mastering rig as my needs for that are fairly simple - just AES i/o to tie it to the Z-Sys digital patch bay - and it works fine -
I've even used it in Live Mode via ASIO in order to use the Levelizer and Hi-Res EQ as real time snap shot capable processors. But it's latency is way longer than the other solutions I mentioned - it wouldn't be something you could really use for serious VSTi or Live mixing productions. You can definitely pick them up very inexpensively now though - so if someone just needs solid AES i/o and even after all this time some pretty decent sounding couple of on board AD/DA's then it's a good deal.

The Lynx Two offers one of the best sounding on-the-sound-card converters (using Crystal Semiconductor chips) - but again it's latency is still longer than what you'll get from RME & Sydec solutions.

For multitrack stuff I favor cards without integrated converters as that allow you to upgrade or swap them at any point.

Best regards,
Steve Berson