Did I kill my EMU 0404

Well, I'm not sure exactly what your problem is, but usually when people have trouble with EMU cards, it's all due to a misconfigured "session".

Try firing up a "default" multitrack session and see if it works better.

Jam, I don't think it CAN be the session. It doesn't make sense that a song would play several measures, then go to the dogs. Seems like the WHOLE song would be that way if I had misconfigured. I was wondering if, after it "warms up", the damage becomes apparent. That still doesn't tell me if it was defective from factory or if I fried it.

I suppose the short question is: can you fry a sound card by having record levels or volumes set to high, even for a short period? Like "blowing" your speakers by playing the volume at max?

Thanks

Greek,
You did not mention what you're using as input for recording. You want to have a line-level input going into your 1/4" inputs. That would be supplied by a preamp, mixer, or some other line-level device like a keyboard or a guitar modeler (eg Pod) output. In each case gain staging is important. Be sure you are getting a reasonable signal (peaking -6 to -3 dB below 0dB fullscale, never clipping) through the front end of your preamp / mixer, etc, using its meter, while adjust the preamp gain / mixer trim. Then the next step of the gain staging is to adjust the output level of your preamp / mixer while watching your Patchmix channel strip meters. If you are having trouble keeping the Patchmix inputs from clipping (meters hitting 0 dB), try setting the E-MU input sensitivity to +4 dBu. Conversely, if you are unable to get your average level into Patchmix high enough, if your sensitivity is set to +4 dBu, set it down to -10 dBV. If Music Creator is your recording app, open it up and setup a track with the ASIO channel send from your EMU / patchmix channel strip as its recording input. Arm record on that track and look at your meter in the recording app. Again, the meter should peak -6 to -3 dB below 0dB fullscale. Now do a couple of minutes of recording. Go back and look at the waveform and ensure it was recorded at reasonable average level and not clipped.

If you are using one of the above described line-level inputs, then it is unlikely you damaged your EMU. It has some protection against excessive input voltages; however, if the gain staging was way-off, you could have severly clipped your previous recordings, which would surely result in crappy sound.

If you've accomplished all the above successfully, and you are still having sound quality problems, then it may be with your monitoring setup. The 0404 outputs are also line-level. They can drive powered monitors or powered PC speakers or a home stereo line-level input. If you use a home stereo, you can then use its headphone output to drive your headphones. You can control the volume to your monitors a number of different ways -- probably easiest to use the volume slider on the output bus from your recording app.

You can check your monitoring separate from your recording, by playing a CD on your PC, and un-mute the Windows Wave channel strip into your EMU patchmix mixer.

If you are still getting crappy sound, check what you are trying to drive with your EMU 0404 outputs. It can't directly drive headphones or passive speakers (powered speakers are OK).

did you run the Wave Profiler in the options/audio menu after installing the card? are you using ASIO driver mode or WDM? the e-mu stuff works much better in ASIO.

i don't think it is possible to destroy a sound card by sending any kind of signal through it no matter how loud.

i would try a different PCI slot, the one you are using may be shared with hard drives, video, USB, who knows what.

yeah you are using WDM if it says E-DSP. the ASIO driver option should be in the audio section of the options menu. the windows volume control thing is different, E-DSP is ok there. it's just the E-MU stuff really needs the ASIO mode to fully use patchmix and the best latency. i don't have music creator but i assume the audio setup should be similar to SONAR. i would start up your music creator software, hit F1 ( help ) and search for ASIO and see what comes up. if you HAVE to use WDM drivers it should still work, but for me Sonar and Project 5 both work better with the EMU card in ASIO mode.

the PCI issue is not any kind of fault or broken stuff, it's just a fact that certain PCI slots share IRQs with various devices. you certainly don't want to share your audio stream with your hard disk controller or video card as that splits up the available bandwidth.


one other possibility: check the emu website and make sure you have the newest driver for your card. i think it might be version 1.82 but i'm not 100% sure.