[HFS1986]

Personally I would choose ESI over M-Audio as I have had bad experiences with poorly made drivers on both PC and Mac for M-Audio soundcards and also because I know that ESI easily produces quality of the same stardard as M-Audio cards. I also prefer the fact that ESI cards don't have a horrible clump of cables behind the PC.

ESI have better drivers and better support for all interfaces and systems

M-Audio are a great choice for people running ProTools M-Powered and the quality it impressive when they work

 

[ezkcdude]

Nobody's going to mention the E-MU 1212M? It's superior to all of these cards.

 

[Patu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ezkcdude /img/forum/go_quote.gif Nobody's going to mention the E-MU 1212M? It's superior to all of these cards.

Why it's superior?

 

[Vertigo Acid]

If you're just using the digital out, it shouldn't matter too terribly much which card you choose. Bit-perfect output = Bit-perfect output

 

[Michgelsen]

Quote:

Originally Posted by HFS1986 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Personally I would choose ESI over M-Audio as I have had bad experiences with poorly made drivers on both PC and Mac for M-Audio soundcards

Really? Can you explain more? I have nothing but excellent experiences with M-Audio drivers.

 

[HFS1986]

Well my M Audio experience isn't particularly representative of all of M-Audio's products but the firewire series has caused nothing but grief. A firewire solo was the only thing to crash both my PC and my Mac and constantly caused digital errors to be captured during recording no matter what drivers I used. A mate of mine also had a firewire version and complained of the same problems.

I have now learnt and heard that the firewire series is a really poor investment.

I have experienced countless problems with one of the M-Audio soundcards in one of the computers at my old university which kept bringing up blue screens everytime a sample rate of 96KHz was attempted to be recorded at 24bit. Unfortunately I can't remember the model though.

I am currently looking at buying a new soundcard and am willing to choose M-Audio if the drivers are reliable on them like you say however, I'm not keen on the clump of cables you get behind most of them as I have a huge tangle of cables already.

I see someone was bigging up the 1212m. I've heard good things about their DAC's but I wanted to know more so I purchased a Creative E-MU 1212m V2 the other day. Two cards and no firewire anymore which is useless seen as I need a free slot to install a firewire card. The drivers were poor and random latency problems occured when using simple programs like iTunes to playback audio. The interface is unecessarily complicated and after all the grief I've had from Creatives consumer products I expected better than this from E-MU's professional ones. I have now returned the card and am looking for something better!

 

[Michgelsen]

You could still try ESI then.

My M-Audio experience isn't representative of all their products either, but I do know that the product I got (Delta Audiophile 2496) is awesome, including the driver. I have successfully recorded in 24/96 for that matter. Latency is also quite low. It's just a good soundcard at everything it does. I'm using it with Windows XP by the way.

 

[003]

Juli@ is better than A192... don't know what problems you were having since you didn't even tell us any, just said it had problems.

1212M is superior in that with a separate add on card ($80 I believe) it can do word clock sync. Of course you would also need a source that supported word clock sync.

And if you guys are referring to the sound quality of their DAC (analog output)... I don't really care, they are all lumped in the same department for me .... quite poor.

I don't know about the 1212M or A192 (or others), but the Juli@ can be modded to have a direct I2S output, which is something I am going to have done.