[Eagle_Driver]

I have an M-Audio Revo 7.1 sound card. But recently, I installed Foobar 2000 v08.2 - and I've also installed the ASIO and Kernel Streaming plug-ins. Unfortunately, I never got either of those to work at all - at least on the music files that I tried to play: .WAV files, Audio CDs, and the like. I was forced to use DirectSound, DirectSound 2.0 or WaveOut as my output (all of which send audio to the Windows Kmixer).

I'm looking to upgrade my sound card yet again, since I want to use the PC for digital music playback and for transferring vinyl to digital. And I do play some games, though I don't want to eat up any PCI slots that would force IRQ sharing with either my Ethernet or my graphics card (I have an Abit NF7-S motherboard with an XP 2600+ Barton processor and 1GB of DDR running Windows XP Pro w/SP1, if you want to know). And I don't need multichannel audio support - because I will never upgrade my current speakers (a 2.1 pair of ACS-48's, which were good in its day).

I know the E-MU 1212 is a 'recommended' card for music. And again, I don't need or want positional 3D audio support at this time.

Any suggestions?

P.S. Oh, by the way, I don't want two sound cards in my computer. Reason: They would make one of them conflict with my graphics card or my NIC.

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

FYI it doesn't matter on nForce2 boards like yours if you run cards on the same "IRQ" or really interrupt pin, windows nt kernel OS's seem to have no problems with this, and I have never had any problems personally, even with 6 PCI cards installed in my 8RDA+.

That said, if you want to transfer Vinyl to digital, the EMU 1212-M is definitely the way to go, as for the price they have the best ADC's (well and DAC's for that matter) avaliable, only rivaled by the $700+ Lynx cards. Plus you can get the EMU modded for even better DAC and/or ADC performance.

As far as KS and ASIO not working with your Revo, what kind of error messages are you getting. Make sure you're using 24-bit padded to 32-bit, that is often overlooked and can cause these types of problems

 

[Eagle_Driver]

When I tried with the shared IRQs, my system would crash and then restart, especially in the midst of surfing the Web.

UPDATE: I finally got both ASIO and Kernel Streaming working. Thank you, Iron_Dreamer, for suggesting settings for both of those to work. I won't need to upgrade my soundcard after all (unless I really want to

)

By the way, Iron_Dreamer, which is your preferred sampling rate when you use ASIO or KS? And do you need to resample in order to get to your preferred sampling rate? (By the way, I have it set for Kernel Streaming right now, and resampling to 96kHz in slow mode.)

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eagle_Driver When I tried with the shared IRQs, my system would crash and then restart, especially in the midst of surfing the Web. UPDATE: I finally got both ASIO and Kernel Streaming working. Thank you, Iron_Dreamer, for suggesting settings for both of those to work. I won't need to upgrade my soundcard after all (unless I really want to )

That's good to hear. Having owned a Revo, I figured it was something simple like that, since that card never gave me any problems.

Sucks regarding the IRQ sharing. Have you tried using APIC?

 

[Eagle_Driver]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Iron_Dreamer Sucks regarding the IRQ sharing. Have you tried using APIC?

Actually, I was already on APIC. Unfortunately, Windows XP tried to map the IRQ of a soundcard that's placed in a certain PCI slot (the one that's second from the bottom) to the exact same IRQ as my AGP graphics card. And that causes the instability. There is no way around that, other than to wipe out my hard drive, move the soundcard to the middle PCI slot, and then reinstall Windows with the soundcard in the third PCI slot (but ideally, Windows should not be installed with any add-in PCI or AGP cards in place other than the primary graphics card). In the users manual for the NF7-S motherboard, the first and fifth PCI slots (referring to the slot next to the AGP slot and the bottommost PCI slot, respectively) both share IRQs - and that IRQ is also the same IRQ that's used by the onboard Serial ATA controller.

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

I have come to the conclusion that on my gear, I like upsampling to 192 for bad recordings as is makes the treble a bit more bearable, however, most of the time I just use straight 44.1 because it sounds a bit more direct. I don't think there is any certain sample rate you have to use with ASIO or KS. I prefer the ASIO interface, simply because KS does wank out on me every once and a while, on just about every different card I've used.

 

[Eagle_Driver]

I stand corrected about my resampling mode. I would have had to select the resampler DSP, and place it into the left window of the DSP manager, in order for resampling to work. Thus, right now I'm using the ASIO plug-in, with the playback quantization rate set at 24-bit fixed padded to 32-bit, and dithering set at trong ATH noise shaping - and no resampling (in other words, 44.1kHz is 44.1kHz - but lower sampling rates aren't supported with this plug-in). If a particular music file has a sampling rate of only 22.05kHz, I would have to use DirectSound or WaveOut.