I’ve got two audio interfaces, an M-audio delta 1010 and an audiofire 12. The audiofire is extremely frustrating to use. It has different hardware latency at any different sample rate and buffer size (as reported by jack_iodelay). Even worse, it has significant variation in latency when one runs jack with the same settings from day to day. On the other hand, playback sounds really good through this thing.
By contrast, the delta 1010 has completely predictable latency (64 frames no matter what) and is relatively easy to work with. But compared to the audiofire 12 the playback sound is much worse. I think there must be certain frequency ranges that the card attenuates, it almost sounds like you’re running the soundwave through a compressor.
Main Question
Now I’m guessing that PCI is just a better bus to use for recording, (though if anybody has suggestions to try and mke the audiofire 12 more predictable, I’m all ears), so I was thinking that if I could pickup Echo’s Layla 3g, I might be able to get the same converters the Audiofire 12 has with the same sort-of reliable latency the Audiofire has. But, is this really true? Does anyone have a layla 3g? Is there an equivalent of the envy24control for the for the layla 3g? (that is, a program that will let me adjust hardware monitoring and other card settings, command-line only is acceptable). Should I consider buying something else?
There shouldn’t be any audio quality issues with a properly configured 1010 (though I don’t know what the rest of the audio path is so I can comment about that), however I did quite recently FFT my 1010 while looking for a similar (but unrelated) issue and it was completely flat from < 20Hz to > 20KHz (looped analogue in to out).
Isn’t the Echo AudioFire12 firewire connected? If it is I have come to realize how sensitive some firewire controllers are. If it is firewire connected what kind of firewire controller do you see/use with ‘lspci’?
I’m sorry for disappearing of the face of the earth for 2 months. I’m not sure if anyone’s still following this thread, but in the event that they are:
I’m just going completely on my subjective experience, play the same source through both cards, switch back and forth and you can hear a difference. Subjectively, I like the Audiofire better. Maybe the problem is that my AD/DA converters on the delta 1010 are worn out from 5 years of use. It’s not like it’s real bad either, it’s acceptable … but the Audiofire sounds better to me.
I run signal in/out of an analog mixer, currently an A&H mixwizard 16:2, formerly a behringer eurodesk. Back when I had the eurodesk I connected up both cards output to the a/b inputs on a channel and swapped back and forth. On the mixwizard I had to use different channels for each soundcard. I was listening to the playback with a few different pairs of headphones. The first time I did it, I remember perceiving a difference but not really having a clear preference. When I repeated the experiment more recently the Audiofire definitely sounded better to me.
I’ve tried with two different firewire controllers, both with Texas instruments chipsets (since this is what echo recommends), I’m away from my rig at the moment so I can’t give you the exact product numbers, but I’ll paste them in later.
Thanks again for your replies, and sorry for disappearing.
I have an AF12 too, since i have a computer with TI firewire and installed KXstudio all the issues are gone.
samplerate 88200
buffer 256
periods 3
->latency 2.9