Monitors and head phones

Steve, isn't there a headphone output on your Emu?

Even if there is a headphone jack I recommend a headphone amp for doing this  The Behringer Minimon Mon800. With it you can switch the outs to what ever you want.

The monitors you say are powered. So you can't use a power amp with them.  The headphone amp I am talking about is a really a pre amp and wont be a problem for your monitors or your headphones.

I have mine using the main out of my mixer then its got the headphones hooked up and also its hooked up to a power amp that goes to my monitors. With the switches on the front all I have to do is switch which I want on or both. 

The Mon800 is placed between you sound cards outs and your headphones and monitors. It becomes a switch box with volume control.

I use a Behringer mixer (v. reasonably priced) to route the output from my main audio soundcard to my powered monitors.  It has a headphone socket :-)

I also use it to input from the PC's on-board soundcard (for games, Iplayer, whatever) and my CD player, mp3 player, mini disc etc.  I don't actually use the mixer for mixing, just a multi-input box.

(edit: I also use the mixer to route instrument signals from the PSA-1, POD, Microphone etc. into the soundcard)

They don't make it any more, but it's something like this:

http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/1622FX.aspx

I use good quality XLR cables throughout for my studio stuff, it sounds pretty good to me.

FWIW:

I use a pair of Yorkville YSM1P powered monitors - very reasonably priced.  They're made in Canada; the sales chap on the phone assured me that they were moose-proof so I bought them!   They've remained completely undamaged by rampaging bovines to this day.

For headphones, Grado SR80i - lovely bins :o)

hi fi speakers are NOT monitors. 

they were never designed for that duty. 

that's problem one. 

i have multiple outs on my soundcard, i dedicate one set of outs, to a seperate 'headphone amp', which happens to be my Yamaha Natural sound amplifier, which is perfect for the headphones. 

you could do the same thing with your denon. 

if you don't have seperate outs available at your interface, you could always buy an inexpensive splitter (radio shack used to have these things cheap) and simply a/b between the genelecs and the denon. 

My new DAW that's on it's way has no sound card and I was going to stick the emu 0404 in and use that.

I hope you have made sure your new DAW has a PCI slot free. It is not that uncommon to find motherboards that do not have anything but PCIe these days.

Sorry that was a mini USB version... here $8:

http://www.buy.com/prod/u...loc/111/213693215.html

Slarty, ignore that link it doesn't work but basicly it's one of their
3XS SA-i7 PowerDAW systems reconfigures slightly.
Steve

Good point Jason. I should try thinking in reverse more often :)
Steve

actually that USB cable doesn't use your onboard soundcard - it has a D/A converter IN it, so it IS a soundcard.  that will cause you to be using 2 soundcards at the same time.  for tracking that's a very bad idea and will cause sync problems.  plus, if you're using your EMU in ASIO driver mode then that USB cable won't work anyway because ASIO only allows one soundcard at a time.

That is not true... I use my onboard soundcard and my interface all the time and go back and fourth and have no problems... I can even assign on the fly and get no hiccups.... Tested and tried....

I'm not going to argue with you jason.  I've read a lot of your posts and you are quite defensive about your knowledge.  but I stick with what I said as true.

One thing to consider... Genelec 8020s are basically headphones in small aluminum boxes with small power amps stuffed inside.

You may not need another pair of headphones.

I'd buy a set of speakers that were physically capable of being speakers before I worried about how to supplement some tiny little 8020s with a set of headphones.

best regards,
mike

"In MY experience the box you can check that says "Share Drivers" allows the use of multiple sound cards/interfaces to be used within Sonar at the same time."

In my experience the share drivers check box does exactly what the SONAR documents say it does... It allows multiple programs or applications to use the same drivers and device.

In other words, I can have SONAR and Soundforge open at once both will see the driver.

That choice has nothing to do with allowing SONAR to see multiple interfaces.

If you use ASIO drivers you can only use one "driver" and as many physical devices as that driver can drive.

If you use WDM you can use multiple drivers... but you may never know if the various physical devices you are using are in sync.

I forget how MME works.

best regards,
mike

I accept your apology, but I agree completely with what mike just wrote.  and I'll add that MME works the same as WDM WRT sonar, multiple soundcards can be used at the same time under MME.  the difference is that MME is a slower protocol.

you can use multiple soundcards with success as long as you don't track with 2 (or more UNLESS they are sync'd by a common clock).  you will have sync problems if you are using one soundcard for recording and another for monitoring because they have 2 different clocks and sonar requires one of them to be the master (see OPTIONS>AUDIO for RECORDING and PLAYBACK TIMING MASTER(S)

the exception for using more than one soundcard for tracking would be cards which can be sync'd together by design.  m-audio's delta series, MOTUs can be sync'd using firewire daisy chaining or any cards can be sync'd using ADAT or SPDIF or other digital references.

otherwise there would be no need for word clocks.
 
EDIT - you were posting at the same time I was writing - so I'll add:
 
when you select one card for PLAYBACK and one card for RECORDING as you are describing, THAT is exactly what I'm saying will cause a problem.  if you haven't seen a problem then you are lucky.  but that exact situation is why you need word clocks or ADAT or some reference clock to keep the soundcards sync'd together.  otherwise you will have tracks drift away from each other in time as you record.  short recordings will not cause a problem that you will notice probably , but record a full length song without stopping and you'll likely notice the tracks not lining up together by the end.