fyi on Waveterminal 192M

jcarney42 wrote on 11/12/2002, 2:28 PM
So far have had nothing but good experiences with this card in both Vegas and Acid Pro. Drivers are stable including the ASIO2 interface. Price is right for those looking for a more professional option than an Audigy without breaking the bank.

system
Athlon 1700xp
abit kg7raid
1 gig ddr ram
ATI radeon video card
SoundBlaster Audigy mp3 used for basic midi and 1394 video capture.
ESI Waveterminal 192M used for all other audio duties.
Edirol MA-10A studio monitors. Only 10watts, I'm saving for better ones.
lots of harddrive space
Win2K

Best prices are at audiomidi.com and draudio.com

Not trying to start a which card is better war here either.

More info at www.esi-pro.com

Comments

salad wrote on 11/12/2002, 3:17 PM
I can vouch for this card too! I got it from audiomidi.com.
I only returned it because I decided to: a) go with a MIDI/audio combo. b) I would have had to purchase a line leveler device(no biggie) since my old unprofessional mixer uses -10dBV outputs.

The documentation is misleading: "Unbalanced (TRS) +4dBu". I believe it's a typo, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Very Nice card indeed!
Combine that with a USB midisport....way cool. It has SPDIF out, which I had running over to my Cambridge 5.1 Desktop Theater for DVD playback. So this card leaves you no reason to keep an Audigy installed.
jcarney42 wrote on 11/12/2002, 6:23 PM
Here's an even cooler thing to do. Instead of sending out DVD playback via sp/dif, get some trs to rca cables and run them directly to analog in on a good AV receiver and get full resolution audio playback even from DVD-A disks. You could actually skip the av receiver and go directly to a dedicated amp.

Great low latency drivers.
I do wish the 8 out were balanced but that can easily be fixed.
jcarney42 wrote on 11/12/2002, 6:26 PM
p.s. It does work with the DLS softsynth manager that comes with Acid. It does not load standard midi files the way the Audigy does. You can use either an external midi controller or a software based midi manager like the one from Edirol.
Cold wrote on 11/12/2002, 7:23 PM
What software would you be using to play DVD A files?
Nat wrote on 11/12/2002, 10:20 PM
Does the converters sound good ? Compared to an audiophile ?

Thanks,
nat
jcarney42 wrote on 11/13/2002, 12:57 PM
to Cold, you can use PowerDVD or WindDVD. The manual gives intstructions on how
to set it up with PowerDVD. PowerDVD can do analog decoding of DTS audio (doesn't require DTS audio to be routed out through optical or sp/dif). I think WinDVD has added support for DVD-A playback.
For better info on DVD playback you might want to go to
www.esi-pro.com and go through some of the news releases. There is a link
to an announcement by WinDVD in there somewhere.

Nat, I think better, but that is purely subjective, everyone has their own preference. I know the audiophile has
1 dsp chip on the card, the waveterminal has the main ESI chip and 4 dsp chips. It also
has TI pre-amp chips which give it a sound more like an analog mixer.
Makes for better multitrack mixing IMHO.
Nat wrote on 11/13/2002, 1:32 PM
Are the specs the same for the wamirack 192l regarding the converters and the preamps ?

can't be worse I guess ?