After a great experience using a Delta 1010LT with ardour running on Linux for years, unfortunately my soundcard seems to be dead.
I need to buy a replacement, but I am having a hard time finding one.
I think nowadays, I shouldn’t buy another PCI card because PCI won’t last too much.
I use the 8 analog inputs (for drum recording) of the 1010LT. So I need a card with at least 8 analog inputs.
RME HDSPe AIO PCI express costs 799,00 USD at Amazon, but as far as I understand I need to buy two AI4S-192 extension boards in order to have 8 inputs. Am I right? That would be too expensive.
I was thinking in buying the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R. Searching in the ardour forum, I saw people sayng that USB interfaces are not good for multi-track recording.
I’ve considered firewire in the past, but it also seems to be with its days counted.
So I need a PCIe soundcard with at least 8 analog inputs, that works with linux and that costs no more than 1000,00 USD. Any suggestions?
You could pick up M-audio or Hoontech or similar linux-supported ICE based PCI sound cards rather cheap on e-bay at $30 or so… you could be up and running with a replacement card, cheaply life-extending your current system.
PCI slots may be be phasing out but they are still very much alive and well, why spend up to a thousand bucks and be severely limited by the SEVERE lack of Linux friendly PCIe and USB2/3 choices when you can simply spend a couple of hundred on a new 1010LT? You will probably be able to continue to use another 1010LT for the next 5 years or so, maybe longer if you are selective about motherboard choices, there is so much pro grade PCI hardware out there that I can’t see PCI slots disappearing for a few years yet. Secondly it’s not like cutting edge hardware is necessary at all for Audio work so even if PCI does disappear that 1010LT can be useful in an ‘older’ specialized DAW machine for a long time. I understand where you are coming from and I agree and believe that point in time unfortunately has arrived for FireWire devices especially in laptops but I think you’re hitting the panic button kind of early for PCI hardware. Geez you could buy 4 1010LTs for the price of some of that RME stuff. I know RME builds top shelf gear but it ain’t gonna sound 4 times better…especially on Linux, I severely doubt there is any more R&D time spent on the ALSA drivers for RME than M-Audio, both cards are consistently at the top of the recommended hardware lists and the 1010LT is a fraction of the cost.
One day Linux simply didn’t recognize my card. No alsa devices created, nothing on dmesg, no modules loaded, etc. I tryed to boot into another partition, removed the card, cleaned the contacts and the problem still persisted.
Then suddenly, out of nothing, in one boot the system recognized it again and it worked once. I found it weird, stopped jack, started it again and the system crashed with a kernel panic. In the next boot the card wasn’t recognized again.
I suspected the PCI slot was malfunctioning, but I plugged a Gigabit ethernet into it and everything worked fine, so I am assuming it is not the slot. Maybe the ethernet card uses the PCI in a way that doesn’t make the problem appear…
Actually there is a USB 2.0 interface that could do, has 8 Analog ins, 1 ADAT and 1 Spdif, thats 18 total, i just got to this blog which indicates that with current Alsa the Focusrite Scarlett 18i6 is working, but my guess is that some more testing than the blog shows would be necessary.
Personally i use a RME 9652, and i’ve never had the chance to actually get to work HARD, maybe PCI is not that popular anymore but a good PCI hardware will cover the needs for the upcoming years, i mean, i have 18 channels that i’ve never put to work … Yet…
