I'm looking for an external sound card for my laptop. Looking for something that has Stereo BALANCE analog IN, along with a Digital (spdif) input. Mostly looking to connect to the laptop via USB. The Echo Indigo card had me interested but it doesn't seem to have the digital input I'm looking for.
I have a Digigram VxPocket V2 (PCMCIA, not USB) in my laptop. It has spdif in, support for 24 bits recording, 2 XLR (balanced) analog in and 2 out (no phanton power though). I've had it for over one year working with WinXP. I am quite satisfied with it. Its mixer allows to control input level as well (as opposed to the Echo/Mia I have in my desk top). I certainly recommend this card, it used to be expensive, but it seems the price has dropped recently. Check the site:
Actually, that was one that I was looking at. Someone I work with has one of these and recommended it also. The VXpocket sounds interesting too, I'll have to check that one out also. The Layla is a bit overkill for what I need. I want this thing to travel easily where I can throw it in my laptop case.
I contacted Echo, letting them know I was looking for something along the lines, of a MIA that I could use for a laptop. They responded pretty quickly, and said there seems to be a lot of similar requests, and said I should keep my eye open near the end of December or early January....hmmmm...maybe I can wait. :-)
I have the VXpocket and it works great, although the cable that connects to the PCMCIA card is a MONSTER. Imagine all the Balanced/Unbalanced/Headphone/etc. jacks that it has going in and out of it in one giant bundle! It's like a stage snake.
B.
I have an M-audio Transit card or order. It has S/PDIF, optical only, in and out as well as WMD and ASIO drivers. We'll see. The price is right though at $100.
I was taken a measure of the USBPre with the Rightmark Audio Analyzer. This measure is a loop between the mic input and the digital output (digital to analog by a DAC1 of Benchmark, for use the 20 bits).
PC>USBPre(Digital out 20bit)>DAC1>USBPre(Mic in)>PC
Thanks for the info Ramallo, it seems to be a pretty good card. I won't be doing much recording with this card, but it's great to know that it's pretty clean if I ever do. I'm mainly using it for an interface to do Spectral Analysis of other audio devices, and had to make sure it had balanced inputs to be sure I was getting a proper common mode rejection signal into the spectral analyzer for my balanced output sources. Got one on order. $550.
Brilliant soundcard with 96khz(24 bit) input spdif i/o. Software mixer allows for interesting routing options. Forget usb (1.0 anyways). This is what it was supposed to be like. Four inputs and 10 out.
I second the M-audio Firewire 410. I use it with my Apple Powerbook G4, it's flawless.
Two balanced (dual XLR / 1/4" connections) inputs + S/PDIF / Coax inputs, along with 8 analog unbalanced outputs, /PDIF and Coax outs, plus two headphone outputs. It can be either self-powered or fed through the Firewire jack.
I bought this card for use with my Smaartlive. I don't had any problem with this card when I used it for measuring devices by transfer function (Balanced line devices or power amps) .
The Siasoft forum is a good point for information about portable sound cards.
I am using both an Echo Indigo and an M-Audio Audiophile USB with a Sony GRT 100 laptop. After some difficulty (needed to update my DirextX version) everything is running smoothly.
There's an M-audio audiophile USB? I didn't want to go the firewire route, because then that was an additional purchase I had to get for a firewire port on my laptop.
The Audiophile USB has analog I/O, s/pdif I/O, MIDI I/O, and headphone output. A word of caution: USB audio interfaces are a known to be a pain to set up on some systems, unreliable on others. I took a chance on mine, and was rewarded with 1 month of trouble-shooting until I updated my DirectX version. In fairness, the problem was with Cubase SX; Vegas functioned flawlesslessly from day one.
I've seen many rave about the Quattro and Omni. I had huge issues with M-Audio drivers and Vegas in the past but since V4 (AISO) the crackle problem for me has been solved. I have the Audiophile 2496 (PCI).
I'll second the Transit. I've been testing it with Smaartlive and it works well. No problems so far.
Like most cards it uses unbalanced audio so special cables are necessary to get the best noise floor with balanced equipment. You can find some good reading about interconnects at: http://www.rane.com/note151.html Take a good look at figure 5 and the text below.
" it uses unbalanced audio"
So you are saying the inputs are unbalanced? If that's true that is exactly the same problem I currently have and am looking for a viable alternative.