Sound Cards

[Princeton]

What sound card do you have in your system other than the digi card and what's the reason for your choice?

I currently dont have any, but I'm thinking of adding one.

[Vegadark]

Well, I know the SB Live works very well. Unfortuantely, I cannot say the same thing about the SB Audigy card.

I used to use the SB Live card along with my 001 to run softsynths. I had a third party driver that enabled low latency with the SB. When it worked, it was great, but half the time the driver would not load properly so I would have to reboot till it did. The stock driver that did not have a low latency worked every time.

So the SB Audigy came out. I had some Best Buy gift cards, and I was sick of rebooting constantly till the Live's 3rd party driver would finally work. I went out and got the SB Audigy Gamer, because it had support for asio. The other one they had did not. So I installed it. I did not get 5 mins into a new session, and PTLE locked up... no error messages. It was like someone unplugged the 001 from the PCI card. I had no sound, could not play or record. None of the aux inputs worked. I was able to save the session and close the session, but when as soon as it closed the session, PTLE locked. I had to alt-ctrl-del to get out. I tried changing PCI card placements (I have 3 PCI cards total: 001, SB Audigy, Promise ATA100). I tried disabling various things like the firewire port on the Audigy. I kept getting the same result. PTLE locks with no error code.

So I finally disabled the Audigy: PTLE works like normal. Re-enable the Audigy: PTLE locks again. These two are on seperate interrupts, so it seems that they just do not like each other. Must be some driver conflict or something.


Something to keep in mind.

[Mark_Knecht]

Vega,
Thanks for posting this info. I was out looking at Audigy cards today. I'll be a bit more careful. (The Audigy was actually going to go in a different machine, but I'd like to have the freedom to move it if I chose to later...)

Normally, for a machine to totally lock, so that even ALT-CTL-DEL doesn't work, requires that the driver is hung in the Interrupt Service Routine with all interrupts masked, so that even a keyboard interrupt doesn't get processed. (Or possibly that memory gets overwritten, but this is unlikely...)

Anyway, weird results. I also use a SB Live! Value.

Take care,
Mark

[mattm]

If you can find an old Ensoniq Audio PCI (ES1370) get it as they are superior to anything Creative make now. SB live cards resample audio, are not capable of true 48kHz and phase coherency between channels is appalling.

Good to know about the Audigy, though. I was toying with the idea of trying one out.

[da BaSsTaRd!]

vegadark, try using the directsound drivers for your synths on the SB Live instead of that funky asio driver... if you only need output from the SBLive, then you're golden because there's no input directsound. otherwise, it works great....

[Vegadark]

I tried all the latest Directsound drivers and MME and whatever else it had on the SB Live. I could never get it to less then 47 ms without getting nasty clicks.

I would be happy with 10 ms. But the SB Audigy is WAY quieter than the Live. Better noise floor.

I'm thinking of building a seperate machine for the softsynths, so I can get the most out of PTLE without bogging it down with 4 softsynths going at the same time.

I really love the NI FM7 btw...

[Vegadark]

Oh, and my machine never totally locked, just PTLE. Even if i was not using the Audigy. I could get out with the 3 finger salute too.

[Mark_Knecht]

Vegadark,
Thanks for clarifying all of this. I'm doing EXACTLY the same thing, building a soft synth machine. I have my old 500MHz Dell that I used for PTLE when I first got started. It's the target for the Audigy.

Happy New Year,
Mark

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by Vegadark:
Oh, and my machine never totally locked, just PTLE. Even if i was not using the Audigy. I could get out with the 3 finger salute too.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>