soundcard advice

Hi all, anyone using mAirList on soundcards with digital outputs?

I need to connect to an Sonifex S2 on the digital inputs so any advice would be appreciated.

btw: We need a soundcard with 2 digital outs

Kind Regards Tony

AES or S/PDIF outputs?

Hi Torben, sorry S/PDIF.

Kind regards tony

Hi all, change of plans. The station concerned will most likely use either 2 individual soundcards (as multi outs are too expensive) or revert to using analog out/in.

Kind regards tony

Hi Torben, sorry to open this again.

Will mAirList see the s/pdif outs OK? it looks like its going to be a pair of delta 66 soundcards.

The mixer in use only has 3 stereo inputs and 3 digital inputs. The analog inputs are tied up with cheap CD/MD Players.

Kind regards Tony

The S/PDIF does not appear as a separate output in mAirList. You will just set mAirList to “default speakers”, and possibly enable S/PDIF output in the card’s control panel.

Thanks Torben.

Hi Torben, we intend on upgrading soundcards from soundblasters to the delta 1010 to gain an extra output and balanced outs in readiness for a new mixer.

Just wondered if anyone has any experience with the delta soundcards and mAirList? Or any experience at all of the said soundcard?

Kind regards Tony

Unfortunately, this particular soundcard model is reported to cause problems fairly often: Dropouts, some channels not working, etc.

Some people haven’t even made the card work without switching to ASIO, which is not preferable (because BASS.DLL handles it much worse than WDM). Seems like the Delta WDM drivers are far from perfect.

Are there any other soundcard models to be taken into consideration?

Charlie, any comments from the soundcard expert?

Thank you Torben, hang onto some money a while longer.

Kind Regards Tony

My experience is limited to the Delta 410 PCI card which offers 4 stereo outs and 1 stereo in via trailing phono sockets. Drivers, to be honest, are hit-and-miss - When I first got the card I was using AudioEnhanceDPS at the time and the Windows2000 drivers were awful. This was due to their inability to work with DirectSound and stopping a deck during “sound” and re-starting it would chuck out a 20ms spurt of the stopped track (think of it as a silenced gun going “phut” when fired)… If the deck was stopped on silence, it’d be fine. I was able to get some different drivers from another user and they cured the issue - This was on a Win2000 machine and thankfully they worked better on XP.

With mAirList (and BCX as both use BASS.dll), there have been no problems on either XP SP2 or Vista SP1. PSquared’s website still shows a Delta1010 offered with a full hardware solution of their Myriad system so they obviously have no problems with it but those guys have probably written their own audio engine!

The only other issue that I’ve ever had is un-plugging my remote-start joystick plug when the computer is on - Several applications (AudioEnhance, BCX, DARP and mAirList) have all played audio in a really odd stuttering/time-stretching way. A reboot with or without the joystick connector sorts it. I would imagine that this is a Game Port issue and a USB device would be immune to that sort of thing :slight_smile:

Perhaps the Echo Gina or Layla may work better ?

Cheers Charlie, our biggest problem with the soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS is the 3rd out which seems to only give stereo out with Soundblaster Surround Sound Speakers.

Insert the mini jack completely into the socket and we get nothing. Insert only halfway and we get mono, though sometimes we ca get stereo using this bodge before audio falls back into mono.

I will have a look at the Echo web site, much past these will be out of budget.

Kind Regards tony

First of all hi ;D

  • I’ve been a lurker on these forums for a while,
    but haven’t come round to posting yet…

At our station we’ve been very happy with the RME HDSP 9632 (with RME AO4S/192 EXPANSION and RME BO-968 AES/EBU breakout cable):

It gives us 6 balanced outputs (Player A, B and Cartwall), and its routing matrix means we can mix those 3 outs internally and send them to the digital output (we’re using AES/EBU, but it also comes with SPDIF)
So all we need to do to switch the studio off air (for training during automated playback times) is to switch the input of our optimod from analogue to digital :smiley:

It’s not the cheapest card out there (you’re looking at just over €500 for the lot),
but it’s been rock solid for the last couple of years, so we just got another one for our studio 2…

Hope that helps someone,
Axel

Hi Axwax, welcome to the forums.

That soundcard is out of budget. just solved the problem this morning by changing the settings used from Side l+r to centre. Insert jack and stereo!

We still intend on upgrading soundcards though to get away from mini-jacks.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Kind Regards tony