I'm looking for a good recording interface for a p4 3.2ghz winxp pc.
I'm not sure if Firewire/USB interfaces are fast or reliable enough
compared to PCI Interfaces. Any thoughts on that? Looks like alot of
people have been recomending Aardvark 24/96's and Q10's but looks like
they've gone out of buisness and there tech support is basically gone.
I'm looking for something with dynamic range around the 120db area and
a 192khz sample rate. It'd also be nice to have something with a least
a couple XLR preamps on the front as well as 6-8 Line inputs on the
back for external mic pre's. Can anyone shed some light on the RME
Fireface 800 or is there any sort of PCI equivalent? I don't want to
spend more than $1500 and if it is over $1000 it better sound sweet and
brew my coffee in the morning. I'm only 18 yrs old and its kind of
tough to decide between having enough $ to feed myself for the rest of
the month or a buying a new toy! Many thanks in advance!!

-andy

wrote:
I'm looking for a good recording interface for a p4 3.2ghz winxp pc.
I'm not sure if Firewire/USB interfaces are fast or reliable enough
compared to PCI Interfaces. Any thoughts on that? Looks like alot of
people have been recomending Aardvark 24/96's and Q10's but looks like
they've gone out of buisness and there tech support is basically gone.
I'm looking for something with dynamic range around the 120db area and
a 192khz sample rate. It'd also be nice to have something with a least
a couple XLR preamps on the front as well as 6-8 Line inputs on the
back for external mic pre's. Can anyone shed some light on the RME
Fireface 800 or is there any sort of PCI equivalent? I don't want to
spend more than $1500 and if it is over $1000 it better sound sweet and
brew my coffee in the morning. I'm only 18 yrs old and its kind of
tough to decide between having enough $ to feed myself for the rest of
the month or a buying a new toy! Many thanks in advance!!

-andy


Hey Andy, i'm a PC/XP user too. I'm using two MOTU 896's right now. I
still think they're the best bang for the buck in terms of prosumer
interfaces. When i bought my first 896 it was about 1800 dollars (Cdn)
now they're down to about 1350 or so which is awesome. The box has 8 mic
pre's which is great for me cause my rig is mobile most of the time.
Very nice LED metering on the front given the price, and very solid. And
like i said above i'm running two of them locked together to give me 16
channels of XLR/TRS in and XLR out.

My particular 896 does 24/96 and the new 896HD's will run 24/192, but
keep in mind that at that sample rate and bit depth you'll need to
upgrade your drives to a RAID 0 array(correct me if i'm wrong, it might
be raid 1, i always forget), or get a faster drive to handle all of that
data throughput. I think my standard Western Digital 7200RPM starts to
clog at about 24 tracks when i'm running 24/96. Anyway i'm starting to
veer off topic.

Roach

wrote in message
ups.com...
I'm looking for a good recording interface for a p4 3.2ghz winxp pc.
I'm not sure if Firewire/USB interfaces are fast or reliable enough
compared to PCI Interfaces. Any thoughts on that? Looks like alot of
people have been recomending Aardvark 24/96's and Q10's but looks like
they've gone out of buisness and there tech support is basically gone.
I'm looking for something with dynamic range around the 120db area and
a 192khz sample rate. It'd also be nice to have something with a least
a couple XLR preamps on the front as well as 6-8 Line inputs on the
back for external mic pre's. Can anyone shed some light on the RME
Fireface 800 or is there any sort of PCI equivalent? I don't want to
spend more than $1500 and if it is over $1000 it better sound sweet and
brew my coffee in the morning. I'm only 18 yrs old and its kind of
tough to decide between having enough $ to feed myself for the rest of
the month or a buying a new toy! Many thanks in advance!!

-andy


192kHz sampling is extravagant, the Presonus Firepod has everything you
really need including decent mic pre's for $600. It's the ramen noodles you
should upgrade g

In article . com,
wrote:

I'm looking for a good recording interface for a p4 3.2ghz winxp pc.
I'm not sure if Firewire/USB interfaces are fast or reliable enough
compared to PCI Interfaces. Any thoughts on that? Looks like alot of
people have been recomending Aardvark 24/96's and Q10's but looks like
they've gone out of buisness and there tech support is basically gone.
I'm looking for something with dynamic range around the 120db area and
a 192khz sample rate. It'd also be nice to have something with a least
a couple XLR preamps on the front as well as 6-8 Line inputs on the
back for external mic pre's. Can anyone shed some light on the RME
Fireface 800 or is there any sort of PCI equivalent? I don't want to
spend more than $1500 and if it is over $1000 it better sound sweet and
brew my coffee in the morning. I'm only 18 yrs old and its kind of
tough to decide between having enough $ to feed myself for the rest of
the month or a buying a new toy! Many thanks in advance!!

-andy

Also look at the new MOTU Traveler, at less than a grand. It's been rock
solid on my Athlon XP3200 system, W2K. The CueMix routing software is
excellent, 4 seperate mixes. The old 828mkII should also be checked out
as I'm sure many of these may be marked down now, or cheep on Ebay.

On Saturday 30 April 2005 04:35 am, thusly spake:

I'm looking for a good recording interface for a p4 3.2ghz winxp pc.
I'm not sure if Firewire/USB interfaces are fast or reliable enough
compared to PCI Interfaces. Any thoughts on that? Looks like alot of
people have been recomending Aardvark 24/96's and Q10's but looks like
they've gone out of buisness and there tech support is basically gone.
I'm looking for something with dynamic range around the 120db area and
a 192khz sample rate. It'd also be nice to have something with a least
a couple XLR preamps on the front as well as 6-8 Line inputs on the
back for external mic pre's. Can anyone shed some light on the RME
Fireface 800 or is there any sort of PCI equivalent? I don't want to
spend more than $1500 and if it is over $1000 it better sound sweet and
brew my coffee in the morning. I'm only 18 yrs old and its kind of
tough to decide between having enough $ to feed myself for the rest of
the month or a buying a new toy! Many thanks in advance!!

-andy


RME Hammerfall HDSP 9652 is a very nice card. It uses the PCI bus instead of
firewire. I would always recommend PCI over firewire. Ideally, you would
use a card such as this along with several Alesis AI-3 units.

The advantage is that you can then choose and change out the preamps as you
please since they aren't part of the audio interface. Furthermore, ADAT is
nice for use with things like digital mixers and DSP hardware.

Also, 192K is a bit over the top. There's really no purpose to sampling at
that high of a rate: there are no mainstream consumer audio formats
anywhere near that high of a sampling rate. Anything more than double your
targeted output sampling rate is just burning up disk space and recording
bandwidth.

-reuben

wrote:
I'm looking for a good recording interface for a p4 3.2ghz winxp pc.
I'm not sure if Firewire/USB interfaces are fast or reliable enough
compared to PCI Interfaces. Any thoughts on that? Looks like alot
of
people have been recomending Aardvark 24/96's and Q10's but looks
like
they've gone out of buisness and there tech support is basically
gone.
I'm looking for something with dynamic range around the 120db area
and
a 192khz sample rate. It'd also be nice to have something with a
least a couple XLR preamps on the front as well as 6-8 Line inputs
on
the back for external mic pre's. Can anyone shed some light on the
RME Fireface 800 or is there any sort of PCI equivalent? I don't
want to spend more than $1500 and if it is over $1000 it better
sound
sweet and brew my coffee in the morning. I'm only 18 yrs old and
its
kind of tough to decide between having enough $ to feed myself for
the rest of the month or a buying a new toy! Many thanks in
advance!!

Why would you want to demand this level of performance?

wrote:
I'm looking for a good recording interface for a p4 3.2ghz winxp pc.
I'm not sure if Firewire/USB interfaces are fast or reliable enough
compared to PCI Interfaces. Any thoughts on that? Looks like alot of
people have been recomending Aardvark 24/96's and Q10's but looks like
they've gone out of buisness and there tech support is basically gone.
I'm looking for something with dynamic range around the 120db area and
a 192khz sample rate. It'd also be nice to have something with a least
a couple XLR preamps on the front as well as 6-8 Line inputs on the
back for external mic pre's. Can anyone shed some light on the RME
Fireface 800 or is there any sort of PCI equivalent? I don't want to
spend more than $1500 and if it is over $1000 it better sound sweet and
brew my coffee in the morning. I'm only 18 yrs old and its kind of
tough to decide between having enough $ to feed myself for the rest of
the month or a buying a new toy! Many thanks in advance!!

-andy


I was looking for a similar solution, and after lots of research decided
to go with the Delta 1010, RNP preamp and 1604vlz mixer for additional
pres and line mixing.....this is a very flexible solution and allows
easy preamp upgrades. Although firewire is a good technology, it's
relatively new compared to PCI and not as "proven", especially for 6+
channels of 24/96 audio. My Delta 1010 gets about 5ms latency, which is
good enough for me.

As others have suggested, I would not suggest paying extra for sampling
rates above 96k....despite their claims, I think even most "audiophiles"
would be unable to tell the difference between 24/96 and 24/192 for most
all audio applications.....talk all the technical jive you want about
anti-aliasing rolloff and oversampling, if noone can tell the difference
then jimmy crack corn and...well, you know

Jonny Durango