Product: Maxi Studio ISIS
From: Guillemot International Inc.
5505 Blvd Saint Laurent, suite 4204
Montréal H2T 1S6 Québec - Canada
Tél : (514) 279-9960 - Fax : (514) 279-0194
Price: US$399.99
Pros: PCI card with external I/O box, 20 bit converters. Full duplex, 8 analog inputs, 4 outputs, plus S/PDIF (digital) I/O @ 48KHz. MIDI synth/sampler with up to 36MB of sample RAM (4MB RAM included), 4MB of Roland sounds, good software bundle and on-line tutorials.
Cons: Higher latency (93ms) in programs such as Cubase than most other ASIO-enabled cards. Compatibility problems with some motherboards (especially those based on non-Intel chipsets). High-pitched screech sometimes emanates from speakers at bootup time. Firmware clipping algorithm causes -2.5dB reduction, making the card unsuitable as a hard disk recording I/O card. Some issues are related to known hardware problems of the SAM9707 ("Dream") chip. Some weak software components. No support for Windows 2000 or NT.
ISIS, ostensibly an acronym for Interactive Sound Integration System, is a Windows-compatible sound card based on the Dream audio chip, discussed at some length in our Terratec EWS 64 review. But the ISIS goes further than the Terratec product, with a much better software bundle and, more importantly, a superior plug-and-play hardware design. Like the Terratec card, the ISIS' drivers probably have some maturing to do, but at least they worked out of the box, on our Windows 98 (and Windows 98 Second Edition) test systems. Indeed, anyone who is used to the amount of hassles that typically accompany an ISA-based sound card is likely to be delighted at the ease with which this PCI sound card configures itself. In fact, we configured one of our test systems with a Terratec card prior to installing the ISIS. With the EWS 64XL installed, Windows, for reasons only Bill Gates knows, had one of those annoying yellow icons in the Device Manager, signifying a resource conflict. A casual examination revealed plenty of IRQs still available in our system; the system sounds played anyway, so we ignored it. But, as soon as we pulled out the Terratec card and popped in the ISIS, our problems vanished. That's the magic of PCI.
In addition to the PCI card's four-channel outputs, gameport and mic/line inputs, you also get a short "port cover" card, connected via an internal ribbon cable, that provides an interface, by way of yet another cable to a very hefty and nicely constructed breakout box, with 8 analog 1/4" phone-jack inputs, four 1/4" outputs, plus both optical and co-axial S/PDIF (digital) I/O. On the back, there's MIDI in, out and thru, too. If you plan to use an external MIDI interface instead of the supplied in/out/thru options, the single gameport can be split with a Y cable (not included), allowing the MIDI interface and a joystick to be connected simultaneously. In short, it's a very fine array of I/O options, conveniently configured in an external unit so you don't have to continually fish around behind your computer to connect and disconnect things.
We tested the card with the included software and a number of other MIDI and audio applications (okay, and games too!) with uniformly good results. The latency (delay) when monitoring recorded input while playing back another track in Cubase VST, however, was over one-half second -- considerably more than the delay incurred by some other sound cards, such as the products from Yamaha, Korg or Sonorus. According to Stéphane Bellanger, Chief Engineer at Guillemot, this is because the Maxi Studio ISIS lacked an optimized Cubase "ASIO" driver at the time we tested it; the card used the standard Windows multimedia driver instead. In 1998, the company said it was developing ASIO drivers for the ISIS; they were planned be available by the end of June of that year. They finally showed up in early 2000. Unfortunately, even with the long-awaited ASIO driver, the card's 93ms latency is still much higher than most others. As of Jan. 2001, the 1.8 release issued in 07/06/2000 is still the most current version available.
(Update: we've since heard that the ASIO2 driver's latency is actually 15-20ms depending on your hardware. As noted on the forums at Cubase.net, the fact that it still shows that the latency as 93ms is apparently only a bug.)
ISIS includes Sonic Foundry's Acid DJ, 200MB of sample data, Syntrillium's Cool Edit Pro SE, Emagic's Logic Audio Pro ISIS, plus soundbank management and playback tools -- in general, a great little collection of useful sound tools.
The included Roland MIDI sound banks are of excellent quality. In our test lab, a side-by-side comparison with the Diamond Monster Sound MX300 served to demonstrate just how awful the Diamond card's MIDI sounds are. We'd still rate the Sound Blaster Live's huge 8MB General MIDI sound set as tangibly better sounding than this card's default 4MB collection, though.
Oh, and a word of warning: the documentation that accompanies this package (which is otherwise excellent, by the way) warns you that you must, and I quote, "insert imperatively Installation Disk - Upgrade 1.0 disk in your floppy, click on the Start button, choose the Run option, type A:\SETUP and then click OK." English challenged though the addenda writers may be, they aren't kidding in this case. We dutifully ignored the advice and rebooted the computer after the initial CD-ROM installation procedure had completed, just to find out what was so "imperative." Our punishment for bad behavior? An ear-piercing screech when Windows re-started. Trust us, it wasn't worth it. (At first, we though the floppy-based update fixed this apparent bug, but it also occurred occasionally after applying the update, usually after a cold boot. Don't take any chances. Reduce the volume initially to see if your system is similarly affected.)
Guillemot says this is simply a bug, and claims that the current release of the drivers fixes this.
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