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Music and Audio Hardware: Part - 2
Sound Solutions: A MIDI & Audio Hardware Primer
In part one of this article, we looked at some of the basic questions you might have when considering what hardware to get for audio and MIDI applications. In this section, we'll dig a little deeper into some of the issues related to PC and Mac sound cards and MIDI interfaces.
First, let's look at the multimedia, "do-it-all" type of cards for the PC.
Professional computer-using studio buffs typically scoff at low-end sound cards such as the Creative Labs Audigy and Audigy 2 line of sound cards for PCs, and point to various inadequacies of these cards, such as (but certainly not limited to) relatively poor signal-to-noise ratios and limited fidelity. In general, we agree: there are certain drawbacks to Creative Labs cards to be aware of. For starters, the original Audigy's box-top claim of "24-bit" audio is little more than a lie, when you actually look at the fine print. Even the Audigy 2, in which this feature is more or less properly implemented, is limited in some regards -- most notably, with a fixed 48/96KHz sampling rate that, critics charge, introduces aliasing into the mix when CD-standard 44.1 KHz output is rendered.
Still, we've obtained reasonably good results from Audigy series cards, and the drivers are exceptionally full featured. If you're a non-professional user or multimedia enthusiast, the Audigy 2 is a good, relatively inexpensive choice. Serious musicians, however, should consider additional investment.
Pro Cards
Bear in mind, also, that, should you choose a lesser-known card or interface, you are more likely to find compatibility problems. For example, it wasn't until Jan. 2003 that Edirol released the final versions of Mac OS X drivers for its line of USB audio interfaces. Around the same time, M-Audio was offering only beta drivers of its acclaimed Revolution 7.1 card. Pioneers tend to get a few arrows in their backs.
Early adopters of Windows XP may also suffer compatibility glitches. Even after the M-Audio BiPort 2x4s had been officially discontinued, Windows XP drivers for the unit were still in beta, and decidedly less than fully feature-complete. Caveat Emptor.
Beware, also, of driver upgrades you really don't need. It's not all that unusual to discover that a driver upgrade actually breaks some older programs, or drops in compatibility with older hardware.
The key feature most pros want from an audio card is digital output. This ranges from a simple unbuffered S/P-DIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface), right up to high-speed optical links to ADAT machines and other high-end equipment. If you need compatibility with DAT machines, be sure to get a card that supports 48 KHz rates. Surprisingly, not all do.
Virtually all cards you'll find on the market today support a feature called "full-duplex" audio, but this, too, was once not especially common. Briefly, full-duplex audio means being able to record while you are playing back -- essential for efficient multi-track recording. In other words, half-Duplex means that a card/driver is only capable of simultaneously processing audio signals in one direction, i.e., either recording or playback.
Historical footnote: there was a brief, horrible period during the early nineties, in which at least one major hardware manufacturer attempted to use software drivers to essentially fool its cards intro behaving like full-duplex cards, leading to a ridiculous situation where the software full-duplex drivers limited the playback sample resolution to 8 bits only (technically, due to the fact that the card could support only one 8-bit DMA channel and one 16-bit DMA channel simultaneously during full-duplex operation), with a correspondingly poor signal-to-noise ratio, while the 16-bit channel acted as the "record" channel. Other, more serious-minded users, resorted to using two half-duplex sound cards instead of a single full-duplex card in efforts to eke out slightly better performance from the two-card system. Fortunately, the days of such shenanigans are largely over.
Because most Pro cards make no pretense about being a do-it all multimedia/game card, you might, in certain circumstances also want to add a Sound Blaster Live or similar card if you want game compatibility. Yes, you might want to have more than one sound card in your system! We added an Event Electronics "Darla" card to our system and it co-existed with an Creative Labs Sound Blaster series card with no problems. We've even heard of users who've installed three cards in their system. Some drivers, including those for the now-discontinued Terratec EWS64XL card, allow several cards to share a single IRQ.
Check your software package(s) and Usenet reports to ensure sound card compatibility before buying.
External Adapters
The second category of audio adapters worth considering for pro audio applications are not cards at all, but rather external audio interfaces. Some are connected via USB, some by FireWire and some via a specialized interface card. As we saw in the case (literally!) when looking at internal sound cards, there are some which try to do it all, and others dedicated to very specific tasks.
The closest thing to an external replacement for a Sound Blaster would have to be the Extigy -- an external, USB-connected box offered by Sound Blaster maker Creative Labs. It's compatible with Windows and Macs -- as long as the latter machine is running Mac OS X 10.2.3 or newer.
There are a number of other external audio and/or MIDI interfaces available. I a future update to this article, we'll look at several. For now, check out the websites of M-Audio (www.midiman.com) and Edirol (www.edirol.com) for a look at some of the most popular.
Drivers
Some otherwise good products are hampered by inadequate drivers. A few years ago, we tested an aggressively priced "pro" card from Echo Corporation (805-684-4593). The company touted its Gina, Darla and Layla series as inexpensive and full-featured PCI sound cards, offering 20-bit recording and full-duplex operation. We tested one of these cards. It plugged and played easily and proved to be very, very quiet. It didn't do much other than record audio and play it back, but it did that exceedingly well. However, the manufacturer neglected to write ASIO drivers (a shortcoming since rectified), yielding a card that, in the applications we wanted to use, suffered from enormously long lags between recording and playback when used with record monitoring on.
The Echo Darla, for example, doesn't have a MIDI interface on it nor does it support Windows MIDI audio playback. Thus, a person requiring these features must get a separate card or interface. Fortunately, it is easy to add a Darla, Gina or Layla card to a system with an existing SoundBlaster or other MME audio card or MIDI interface.
Another great piece of hardware from that era was the Digital Audio Labs Card D-plus. However, it wasn't until driver version 3.0 that you could use it in full-duplex mode.
A friend of ours paid a great deal of money -- close to $1000 -- a few years back, for an emagic Audiowerks card. This product was originally designed for use with Logic Audio, but was later enhanced with drivers supporting third-party sequencers, albeit with a limited number of tracks. Sounds good, right? Well, imagine our surprise when we discovered its lack of support for the 48KHz rate used by high-end DAT and ADAT (etc.) recorders. Even a $50 SoundBlaster Live can do that. The lesson here is: don't assume that, just because a product's expensive, it can do as much as a do-it-all card. <Insert obligatory reference to Jack-of-all-trades here.>
Some products never get the acclaim they deserve because they are not marketed effectively, or the company changes direction. We remember, for example, a local music dealer in the early nineties raving about the then-new Ensoniq Soundscape Elite. This card, he showed me, had a positively amazing number of controllable software parameters (for DSP effects, etc.). It was reasonably priced, it worked well in audio and sequencing environments, and it had really cool DSP effects. And then Creative Labs bought the company, and the focus on sound cards quickly shifted to target consumers, not the musicians Ensoniq had originally aimed to reach.
Sometimes, an otherwise promising product has a design limitation that makes you wonder "what the heck were they thinking?" One example that comes to mind was the Digidesign Audiomedia III. At one point, this card didn't even support stereo files. Also, the PCI burst mode had to be disabled in the BIOS settings of PCs. (Digidesign eventually developed a revised chip for the AudioMedia III, to make it work with burst mode enabled. (Needless to say, the company's user forum was full of users reporting serious AMIII problems.) And all this from a company renowned for its pro audio solutions! See http://www.digidesign.com for more information.
In general, we'd recommend getting a card that comes highly recommended by someone using it for the same kind of task you have in mind.
In part 3, we'll look at MIDI interface options and more sound cards. Read on....
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