What was your first audio interface?

[Mesh 1,680]

Mine was this 8x8 Gadget Labs Wave 824 and I think I got it somewhere around 2005. The PCI card was connected via a 6ft. 25-pin D-sub connector.   

[craigb 2,895]

Some very expensive Turtle Beach card that this new software called Cakewalk (v1) required. 😉

[pwalpwal 958]

esi wavterminal 192m

with the MIDI- / Digital-I/O Add-On Extension:

Edited June 13, 2019 by pwalpwal

[synkrotron 577]

blimey!

it was ye olde Sounde Blarster, with a EMU daughter board

[InstrEd 1,726]

34 minutes ago, synkrotron said:

blimey!

it was ye olde Sounde Blarster, with a EMU daughter board

Me too!

[Zargg 156]

Hi. My 1st AI was the M-Audio Delta 1010lt

Had it for almost 10 years, before I sold it, in great condition.

Drivers got a bit messy at the end.

All the best.

 

[msmcleod 1,981]

Not counting the soundblaster clones, mine was the Yamaha DS2416 DSP Factory:

Cost me half a months wages at the time, but ran like a dream in my Cirrus P-166 with 64MB RAM.

As soon as they started appearing on the 2nd hand market, I bought another and had them linked together along with 4 x AX44 (the breakout box in the drive bay). I also had the AX16-AT ADAT card interface for them, which had fed by a Behringer ADA8000. 

The two cards gave me a 48 track mixer with dynamics & 4 band parametric EQ on every channel, and 4 x effects units (each the equivalent of an FX500). 

I got nearly 20 years use out of these babies.... and they're still working on the Win 7 32bit boot on my studio PC with SONAR Platinum. This is the reason I hardly touched a plugin until about 5 years ago.

[Amicus717 296]

When I first realized I could do music on my computer, I was using an Creative Audigy2 (which I had added for gaming purposes), and stuck with it for a year or so as it could load Soundfonts, and I had a whole bunch of them.

My first actual audio-specific soundcard was the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI.  Great little card, sounded clean and was stable. 

[arlen2133 54]

2 hours ago, synkrotron said:

blimey!

it was ye olde Sounde Blarster, with a EMU daughter board

Me three!

[Paul Young 1,008]

Yamaha SW1000XG - biggest waste of money ever.    I was pretty ignorant about buying soundcards and thought it would compliment my Yamaha portable keyboard.  Newer chipset made it obsolete during the XP era.  Yamaha is the king of doorstops .   

All of my M-Audio  (2) AP2496, AP192, FW410 are still working.

Doorstops

 Tascam 822 PCI - made by Frontier Designs, nice low latency, go it free with Gigastudio.  No 64 bit support.

Terractec EWX2496 - one of the most underrated budget cards.  Ran it on a W10 system using beta Vista 64 drivers while it never bluecreened Windows would report errors.   I could probably pop it in my old Intel system and it would work.

Echo Mia - I wonder why Echo stopped making audio interfaces.

 

[Zargg 156]

53 minutes ago, kitekrazy said:

Echo Mia - I wonder why Echo stopped making audio interfaces.

 

 

Same here. I had a Mia I gave to my son, and had an Echofire 8 as my studio AI for a while. Great quality, both devices.

They went into multimedia and gave up on Pro Audio equipment around Win 7/8.

All the best.

[bitman 89]

Echo mia cha cha cha!

[Keni 86]

Turtle Beach?

[batsbrew 223]

TEAC X10

 

then this:

 

then this:

 

then my first digital interface:

 

the beginning of the descent down the rabbit hole.

[msmcleod 1,981]

Well, if we're including them then....

...which was only EVER any use with the battery pack, because of a constant mains hum with the PSU.

Followed by: 

Then finally....

 + 

[Christian Jones 795]

I got this ISA card in about '97 and used it for quite a while, hooked up via plain old red/white audio cables to a Mackie 1402vlz. I used to hound the guy at Digital Audio Labs over the phone constantly trying to get it to work as I had no idea about buffers etc back then. I think it even cost almost $300 back then too. 

Somewhere in early 2000s I wanted to get their CardDeluxe but ended up w/ the Echo Gina for a minute, sold it and had the M-Audio Delta 1010lt for a second, sold it and got the RME 9632 which I'm still using. I plan to stick with RME and get their flagship soon. As for that Card D Plus, I'm waiting for it to appreciate before I hit the vintage market with it. 

[craigb 2,895]

I ignored all the sound cards prior to Cakewalk v1 since those weren't for making music (and were mostly SoundBlasters).

This was sound card #2.

And this was #3.  #4 is still TBD!

 

[DeeringAmps 804]

Tascam 688 synced to Cakewalk 3.0 via MOTU midi interface

Then onto Pro-Audio via

Sound Blaster

Echo Layla

Tascam FW-1884

RME UFX

[Amicus717 296]

If we are listing our entire soundcard history, I better expand mine:

Audigy 2

M-Audio 2496 PCI

Emu 1212M PCI - (was a huge step up from the M-Audio, especially in terms of converters -- first time I fired it up, the sounds coming from my monitors was a whole class of sound better, cleaner, more detailed, etc. Loved this card, although the drivers were twitchy)

Mackie Onyx 1220 w/Firewire Card

Roland V-Studio 700 (great control surface, great interface, if only it had been maintained with proper drivers and the integration with Sonar hadn't slowly died away)

ESI Juli@ PCIe

and now an RME Babyface - which I love, and has convinced me to stick with RME going forwards. Best interface I've ever used, with the best drivers...

[Christian Jones 795]

27 minutes ago, Amicus717 said:

Mackie Onyx 1220 w/Firewire Card

How did that Onyx work for you? I never owned one but I followed for a while the nightmare w/ the drivers that a lot of people were having on Mackie's forum back then. I don't know the percentage of people who had issues vs those that didn't, but there seemed to be a quite a few. I did almost buy one of those Mackie Onyx mixers that had the interface built in.