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Looper's Delight
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I wanted to share my experience with the E-MU 1616
cardbus audio interface, for the benefit of any future max pc/xp loopers
who happen to encounter problems with the interface. I'm sure there are folks
who are using this product with success, so this is not a negative campaign
against the product, but only my experiences with the product with one
particular system and app.
I bought this interface to run on a Lenovo (IBM)
ThinkPad T60p (commercial/business class notebook), with 2Ghz duo core
processors, 2gig of RAM, XP Pro, newest version of MAX/MSP, etc.
In short, I could not get the E-MU ASIO driver to
perform with an acceptable degree of latency, and even though the Directsound
driver functioned properly, it did not yield an acceptable latency either. I
could get the ASIO driver to perform with minimal latency, but not without using
MAX/MSP I/O Vector Size and Signal Vector Size settings, and ASIO buffer
settings, that caused MAX/MSP CPU utilization to skyrocket into 80% and
above, which is HIGHLY unusual and indicates something serious going on between
max and the E-MU ASIO driver.
After several hours of phone calls with both
Sweetwater Sound and E-MU tech support, the most acceptable conclusion at this
point is that the E-MU ASIO driver and MAX/MSP are not playing well
together...more reasonably that there are compatibility issues with the E-MU
ASIO driver.
Long story short, I sent the unit back and am using
a simple Edirol UA-25 USB interface (whose ASIO driver works perfectly fine with
max with acceptable latency) for the interim, until I buy mac book pro on
January and a RME Fireface 400.
I'm buying a mac, not because I believe it will
perform better than my PC/XP notebook, but because I am interested in exploring
a new platform (after using PCs since 1989) the expanded I/O options, and Core
Audio system.
Kris
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