sound card upgrade

[dabeat]

want to upgrade my sound card and it can work well with SS.
any suggestion ?

[Bob L]

RME... Sydek... both have excellent drivers.

I actually used an M-Audio inexpensive firewire box a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised by the driver perfromance in ASIO mode.

Bob L

[dabeat]

Thanks,
is the DAC chip set very important to the interface?
i saw AKM chip set in my friend's Fireface 800.
i guess it is the latest hi-end chip set.
how about ananlog device's products ?
any interface ( with good sound DAC ) you suggest?

[Bob L]

Same answer... RME and Sydec... in fact, the RME Digi96 HDSP does not have the converters inside... you can use converters costing thousands of dollars if you are that concerned... the imporatant thing with these products is the driver performance.

Bob L

[Microstudio]

I use The Motu 2408 MK2 with SS and it is great in ASIO driver mode. You can get them on ebay for around 225.00

[dabeat]

i am interesting in "MadiXtreme".
but the sydec's web made me confuse with too many products.
few questions, can you help ?
do i need to re-purchase my plugins specially for MadiXtreme ?
which sydec gears i need to add if i need optical/coaxil in/out, Balanced XLR in/out, MIDI in/out ?
is it the Mixtreme 192 without "Dwave protocol " Driver ?
RME or MadiXtreme you ( Bob ) suggest ?

[Bob L]

I have an older Mixtreme which I use on a devleopment machine... all my production machines are using RME cards at the moment... different ones.

I have no Madi experience.

Exactly how many ins and outs do you need?

Bob L

[dabeat]

in fact, i did mastering jobs more.
so i guess i leaning better sound quality interface.
but sometimes i still use SS for multitracks mixing.
i think the madixtreme design is similar with Sonic Solutions.
but i didn't know it should use their specially plugins or not.
because it is a DSP base interface, so i need to carefully.
software plugins can eat lot of money.
informations from there is not very clearly for me.
anybody have experience on this card here ?
about the in/output, i think i don't need too much.

[Bill Park]

in fact, i did mastering jobs more.
.....

I have never found it to be a good idea to plan to buy a product that does not exist, and an even worse idea to buy version 1.0 of anything. The Madixtreme is not yet available. When it becomes available, even if it meets schedule, do you really want to be the guy who finds all the bugs for the company?

And, if you are doing mastering, why do you need 64x64 digital streams of 192k?

It seems to me that a mastering engineer would want 2 great channels of input, 2 of output, a calibrated monitor control and a killer set of speakers in a sonically treated room. No need for the Madi aspect as far as I can see. What are your uses for madi?

Yes, mastering quality plug ins do cost money. But there are also quite a few decent low budget options to get you started.

I usually recommend seperate components, because you can change pieces/parts as you grow, without having to replace everything in your rig.

I looked at the prices of the plug ins for the Madixtreme card. Not much of a deal, and limited selection, compared to what is available out there.

Bill

[TotalSonic]

If mastering is indeed what you are doing then most likely you just need AES i/o to tie to great external converters and to all of your digital transports - and probably 8 channels max at that.

The best solutions for this to me are either the RME HDSP-AES32 - http://www.rme-audio.com/english/madi/hdspaes32.htm
or the Lynx AES16 - http://www.lynxstudio.com/aes16.html

Both the Lynx & RME stuff has shown to me to be equally reliable and equally easy to install.

The differences are:
* the Lynx is slightly cheaper
* the RME can run well at a little bit faster latencies than the Lynx can - so if you intend to not just use it for mastering (where monitoring latencies don't matter for typical work flows) but also for things like playing VSTi's/virtual samplers/software synths - or for doing live near real time input monitoring through the DAW app itself - then go for the RME
* the RME includes Total Mix console software - which seems a bit more elegant in its virtual routing options and more full featured than the soundcard mixer software included with the Lynx. Still - the Lynx software functions well and will certainly also get you there for what you would need for typical mastering work flow.
* the RME has the option for a breakout box - while the Lynx just have options for cable breakouts. For me all the computers just sit in the walk in closet and I end up having longer AES cables going back there anyway from the Z-sys detangler which is in the rack - so the breakout box really wouldn't be much of use for me anyway - but if you were creating a portable solution then I think a breakout box would be more robust.

Anyway - even though both these cards have pretty fully functioning routing functions an external hardware digital patchbay like the Z-Sys or the Little Labs makes work flow with a lot of transports or external devices that you need to access on the fly a lot easier to deal with.

Best regards,
Steve Berson