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What was your first audio interface?


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

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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.

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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. 

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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.

 

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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.

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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. 

20190613_153133.jpg

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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...

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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. 

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10 hours ago, kitekrazy said:

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 .   [....]

 

Both the DS2416 and the SW1000XG share the same set of drivers, so they will actually work right the way through to (and including) Windows 7 32 bit.

The issue is that in Yamaha's infinite wisdom, they designed the cards so they require both the 3.3v and 5v inputs on a PCI 1.0 slot. The vast majority of motherboards dropped the 5v, so choosing the right motherboard became paramount if you wanted to keep using them. There was also as you say, chipset issues with PCI 1.0 emulation.

That's the main reason I still use a 3rd gen i5 - my Asus motherboard has the last chipset that doesn't emulate PCI 1.0 (it's native), and also supports 5v in the PCI slots.

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