tsf -- I would be shocked if the Tascam 1804 sounded as good as the 1212M/1820M.
From the 1804 owners manual (available on the Tascam US web site):

THD (at maximum input level)
< 0.007% (normal FS) 1 kHz, MIC/LINE IN to STEREO OUT
< 0.009% (Hi FS) 1 kHz, MIC/LINE IN to STEREO OUT

Frequency response (at nominal level)
20 Hz - 20 kHz (normal FS) +0.5 dB/–1.0 dB, MIC/LINE IN to STEREO OUT
20 Hz - 40 kHz (Hi FS) +0.5 dB/–1.5 dB, MIC/LINE IN to STEREO OUT

S/N ratio
> 97 dB (normal FS) MIC/LINE IN to STEREO OUT, TRIM min
> 91 dB (Hi FS) MIC/LINE IN to STEREO OUT, TRIM min

The Tascam has a better frequency response at high (96K) sample rates ... but the 1820M has a much, much better dynamic range, and likely lower distortion as well. Which doesn't mean the Tascam is a bad product -- just that Emu converters and analog circuitry are excellent (equaled/bettered by Apogee or RME Fireface, I'd guess, but not by anything else in your price range). The EMU drivers, on the other hand ..... well, I'm about to find out !

- Jim

Does that mean that you're using the ADAT for syncing as well?

Yup, thats all I use. Sounds good to me. Years ago I had a Digital mixer that I synced with the BNC or with the ADAT, both ways sounded the same to me. So I went back to the ADAT I/O's as it was easier.

I wanted to buy a BENCHMARK, but it was only stereo, and I wanted to get into 5.1 mixing so I needed at least 6 I/O's, and the BENCMARK @ $900 did not offer a good return on investment. Check out the BENCHMARK if you only need 2 I/O, it sounds great.

I can live with 2 outs. But I need upward expandability for the Ins. Any suggestions. I think I'm talking quite a bit of money.....................JDW

Speaking of losing or misplacing the connector, do you think EMU is going to sell the microdock separately at some point? I wouldn't want to find myself a year down the road with a broken microdock unit (even if it was my fault), only to have to purchase the entire 1616m package, including the pcmcia card.
tsf

I'll just never forget. After hours of recording or that perfect take.



..........................................JDW

Jim, the thing is "Spooky". Some of things it will do don't even make sense to EMU. Be prepared. And there is no pattern to it. Some things are obvious. Then sometimes it will be working great and all of a sudden. My date on my CPU is 1/05 so age does not seem to make a difference and you know I'm Intel.....................JDW

Thanks to Jim Wright for pointing this post out to me. I don't often do web forums (I'm a regular in the cakewalk.audio newsgroup, though), so hadn't seen this thread, but see it mentions my review of the 1820M and some recent intermittent problems I've had with the AudioDock powerup. I figured I should try to weigh in on my situation and where I stand on the 1820M at the forest level since sometimes trees-level issues can get intense enough that they seem to be the forest.

First thing is that I still consider the review I did at CakwalkNet.com, which is at http://www.cakewalknet.com/index.php?page=article/show&article=92995c34d22358f5d8dc2d51dfa06f6f&PHPSESSID=ac5f0fd6a526dc8f98ad8562f6cf153b, to be accurate. While the net of that review was pretty positive about the 1820M, I also made the following comment in the summary section of the review:

Sure, there are some niggles, a few of them of non-trivial concern. If I were running a commercial studio, where time is money and directly impacts customer satisfaction, I might be tempted to settle with a lesser product, or a much more expensive one if budget allowed, to avoid the risk the most serious of these (i.e. the ASIO hang on a DAW crash) posed. Then again, if I were running that type of studio, I'd be all the more careful about what plug-ins I allowed on my system, and one that sounded great but had a high risk of crashing my DAW probably wouldn't be in operation in front of paying customers.

For my environment, though, time decidedly does not translate to money (unfortunately). Thus, quality of results and functionality, including providing for future growth -- oh yeah, and keeping budget as tight as possible -- are much bigger concerns. In that scenario, which I'd guess applies to a fairly significant portion of CakewalkNet readers, the E-MU 1820M has raised the expectations bar. That is really good news for DAW users, though probably decidedly less so for E-MU's competitors.

While the problem that has been mentioned, and become fairly intensely discussed recently, on the E-MU forums at http://www.productionforums.com/emu/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3362 surfaced after the review was in the approval cycle, specifically at the time I loaded the 1.71 versions of the drivers and PatchMix DSP, and thus the details of my coment above might have changed slightly, the net summary remains the same. That is, for my environment, the 1820M gives me great quality results and functionality, and provides for areas I see as possible considerations for future growth (e.g. higher sample rates, possible video work, surround production, and even tracking multiple concurrent musicians). But, as of the current state of the drivers in general, and the overall package on my particular system, I'd be somewhat leery of using the 1820M in a time-is-money studio. It would still be mainly because of the locking of the ASIO drivers if SONAR (or another ASIO app) crashes, which is supposedly resolved in the upcoming drivers, which I gather are imminent (and I was on the phone with an E-MU support guy who'd contacted me about my current issue just yesterday afternoon). However, the other issue would also cause me some concern because, though things run great when the AudioDock is work, which is most of the time, if the non-powerup thing does arise, the time it has taken to recover from it to get everything back working all the way (i.e. AudioDock powered up and sound coming out of the actual audio outputs) can be unpredictable.

If you want more details on the recent problem I've been seeing, you can read about it extensively at the above-referenced address, and I will also be posting any significant updates to that thread. However, let me try and briefly describe it here for those who want a quick summary:

Every once in a while -- the last three weeks it has happened once a week, approximately a week apart -- after the AudioDock has been working normally for whatever period of time before that, the AudioDock will not power up after a cold boot. A soft reboot will restore the power, but, though PatchMix is showing audio going to the audio outputs, none will be heard at the actual audio outputs. There are other scenarios where this no actual audio output can happen (e.g. after a driver upgrade), and there are two potential solutions to it. One is toggling the sample rate (e.g. from 44.1k to 48k and back), which does not require a system reboot. The other is running the E-MU "Restore Defaults" program, which sets everything back to default settings, which does require a reboot. At least in my situation, when the lack of actual audio output has come directly after a failure of the AudioDock to power up, the toggling sample rate solution does not restore audio, so I've had to run the Restore Defaults program to try and get audio back. This means a reboot is required.

Prior to having installed the 1.71 drivers, this non-powerup situation occurred a small number of times. I don't recall if I mentioned it in the review or not because, at the time, I didn't consider it all that significant because running the Restore Defaults program, then rebooting would clear it up first time every time. (And I know I did mention having to run that from time to time with the loss of audio.) However, after loading the 1.71 drivers, I found, be it coincidence or related to the 1.71 drivers, that often, after running Restore Defaults and rebooting, the next boot up would result in the AudioDock's not powering up again, thus placing me back at square one. And, as of the moment, I still haven't figured out any definitive pattern for when it will and when it won't power up after this situation has occurred (or, for that matter, when it does and doesn't power up after running just great for a week or whatever). The lack of predictability here on when it will occur, even if that is rare compared to when it won't occur, and how long it will take to get back to sanity after it does occur, is the bigger concern for me than that it has occurred at all.

In the last week or so, I learned that some new issues were discovered in the 1.71 drivers that might have explained my problem, and that E-MU was making the 1.60 drivers available again for any users who might be experiencing similar problems. At the time I learned about this, the unit was working, so I wanted to just leave things as they were until such time as they failed again. That happened Thursday night, almost exactly one week after the last time it happened. I regressed to the 1.60 drivers, thinking that might cure the problem first time like it had done when I'd originally been on the 1.60 drivers, but didn't get the AudioDock back to full operation that night after several rounds of Restore Defaults and rebooting (both soft and hard reboots). However, it did come fully back to life Friday morning, and has been operating fine since then, across several reboots. At this point, I don't know if the 1.60 driver regression will get me back to where I'd been prior to the 1.71 drivers, and the experience in trying to get things back to life the first night happened just because it took a few rounds to clear out something that was a remnant of having been using the 1.71 drivers all day and to the point of the problem, or whether it was just a coincidence that things cleared up in a half day this time (versus 3.5 days the previous time) and next time it happens it may take longer. Also, the 1.80 drivers are imminent, whether that means a few days away or a few weeks away, so it's possible that may affect things if/when I install those.

Late yesterday a technical person (not sure if he was a support guy or an engineer) at E-MU contacted me to get actively involved in trying to resolve the problem. From our phone conversation, it appears his main suspicion is that something in the hardware may be flaky on my unit. He has suggested a course of action intended to try to either confirm this suspicion or eliminate the possibility the hardware is the cause of the problem, and I've agreed to his plan as being a reasonable next step for troubleshooting this. Unfortunately, the next steps in this may take awhile, partly because of my schedule between now and July 5th, and partly because, as the problem is intermittent, you can't really know definitively when it has disappeared, only when it has not, and it could be a week, or even more, between occurrences. At any rate, I am satisfied that his plan makes sense, and, however, long it takes to get to the next step -- and I'd guess on the order of a month -- I will pursue that route.

For my part, I would not bet on or against the hardware's being the issue, though I'd lay higher odds to the hardware's being the issue for why it sometimes doesn't power up for no seeming reason and the driver's being the issue for why it then sometimes becomes tough to recover quickly. On the side of the hardware's being the problem on the powerup issues, I do have one colleague who has an 1820M, and he indicated he had some initial powerup problems, but then that E-MU replaced the AudioDock and he hasn't had any since. On the side of the drivers is what seemed like a clear behavioral change when having to resolve the issue between the earlier 1.60 drivers and the newer 1.71 drivers. However, that wouldn't necessarily explain the lack of powering up in the first place, and it could always be just a coincidence that things were getting worse in something and so it became trickier to resolve and more frequent. The next week or so may give some clue on whether reverting to the 1.60 drivers has changed the empirical frequency of the thing. Whatever it is, though, I will be glad when we get to the bottom of it and get it resolved, and I hope that resolution will be helpful for any others who may be experiencing similar issues in the future.

For the record, I have no relationship with E-MU other than being a (mostly) happy user of the 1820M, a "jury's still out" beginning user of Emulator X, having reviewed the 1820M for CakewalkNet, and planning to review the next update of Emulator X (timing TBD, but I think late Summer or early Fall) for CakewalkNet. Oh yeah, and I think I owned an SB16 once upon a time. ;-) I'm aware of the Audigy history, but never considered that to be anything more than a gamer's card anyway (I was using either a Sonorus STUDI/O card or an MOTU 2408 mkII at the time), so my reaction to all that hullabaloo was more or less, "what do you expect?". (Though I will admit to having used even lower end consumer cards as MIDI interfaces -- in fact, I did that, alongside my trusty old ISA format Roland MPU 401/MIF-IPC from back in 8086 days, until earlier this year when I started using the E-MU 1802M's MIDI ports and finally removed the ancient, but still working, MPU from my system.)

Last thing I'll mention. Someone mentioned qualifications needed to write for a free e-zine, I suppose implying my CakewalkNet review carried no credibility. I'll let the review stand on its content, as with anything I write, be it in a free e-zine, in a newsgroup or discussion forum, via e-mail or whatever. However, FWIW, I spent about 15 years working in the computer industry in various positions that straddled technical and marketing roles, including product management, leading a small custom software shop, helping software vendors port their applications between platforms, designing solutions for complex problems spanning multiple vendors' products and multiple technologies, and lots more. I've also been a lifelong singer, musician, songwriter, and recordist (my earliest multitracking used two cassette decks), and have been a full-time songwriter (and whatever else it takes to get the songs out there, including producer, singer, musician, publisher, etc.) since mid-1997 with the roughly year before that split about half time between the computer industry and music industry. I've been using MIDI since the original DX7 came out, and jumped into computer-based MIDI when the state-of-the-art processor of the day was an 8086. I've been using SONAR since day one (and CWPA9 before that -- prior to that my sequencer of choice was MasterTracks Pro Audio, and I used the SAWse audio component of that, along with Samplitude Basic and N-Track studio for awhile prior to moving to the Cakewalk camp). I suspect a fair amount of that experience just might be somewhat applicable to reviewing computer-based music products.

Rick

Well, it appears that the new drivers may have appeared: http://www.productionforums.com/emu/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3643. They've been posted on the Creative website in Asia:

See: http://www.asia.creative.com/support/downloads/download.asp?Product_ID=10498&Product_Name=E%2DMU+0404&OSName=Windows+XP&OS=10&DriverType=0&details=1

And scroll down to Drivers. The name of the file is EmuPMX_PCDrv_L4_1_71_21.exe (Different from E-mu's official 1.71 which is EmuPMX_PCDrv_L4_1_71_03.exe).

The details state:

Driver patch V1.8 contains the following feature enhancements and fixes:

Driver Version 5.12.1.1102
Feature Enhancements:
• Improved ASIO / WDM recording performance during bursts in PCI bus activity, in order to eliminate recording dropouts
• Improved ASIO driver behavior when used with Sonar
• ASIO driver now fully recovers after an ASIO application crashes or is abnormally terminated
• Improves PCI performance by automatically setting optimal PCI Latency values for the DAS hardware
• Improved efficiency of PCI bus utilization, to allow for better recording performance on systems with other PCI-intensive devices (such as Effect Accelerators, SATA hard disk drives).

Fixes:
• Fixed bug where Cubase SX would not accept sample rate changes from PatchMix DSP
• Fixed bug where Sonar would crash when using ASIO at a sample rate that was not the same as PatchMix DSP
• Fixed a bug introduced in driver V1.71 affecting 1212m, 1820 and 1820m , where symptoms may incude AudioDock not responding correctly and External Clock not functioning

Several bits of mystery -- 1) they're not posted on the US (or European) sites yet; 2) the file name suggests version 1.71xxx, but the change history clearly says V1.8; 3) there's no new PatchMix version -- just drivers -- and no information concerning which version of PatchMix should be used with the 1.8 driver version. (From scanning previous change histories, it seems like PatchMix V1.6 might be appropriate, rather than 1.71, since all the 1.7x changes were for the 0404, and 1.71 has apparently been bad news for folks like Rick Paul.

ICHi has posted:

For those of you who played with the betas uninstall everything, reinstall from CD then update to 1.80.

For users of 1.0, 1.5, 1.6, or 1.71 you can update directly.

- but hasn't addressed the 'mystery issues' mentioned above.

I'm posting this here (rather than starting a new thread) because it seems premature to announce new drivers have arrived until there's an official release and PatchMix-related details up on the US website. Still -- seems promising!

FWIW -- my 1820M arrived today, and so far is behaving exactly as expected -- sitting quietly in its box, since the DAW isn't assembled yet

- Jim

ORIGINAL: Jim Wright

Several bits of mystery -- 1) they're not posted on the US (or European) sites yet; 2) the file name suggests version 1.71xxx, but the change history clearly says V1.8; 3) there's no new PatchMix version -- just drivers -- and no information concerning which version of PatchMix should be used with the 1.8 driver version. (From scanning previous change histories, it seems like PatchMix V1.6 might be appropriate, rather than 1.71, since all the 1.7x changes were for the 0404, and 1.71 has apparently been bad news for folks like Rick Paul.

Assuming it is not just coincidence that the frequency of, and time to recover from, the non-power up situation seemed to increase with the 1.71 upgrade on my system, I think it would likely be the 1.71 drivers, not PatchMix, that was causing the problem. After all, when the power state of the AudioDock gets toggled is pretty early in the WinXP bootup process -- when the Windows logo is on the screen -- and I'm pretty sure PatchMix starts a fair bit after that stage of bootup.

I haven't tried the new drivers yet (I'm still running 1.60 drivers with the 1.71 PatchMix at this point, and there have been no further power-up failures on my system since Thursday night), but I'd guess that, if it doesn't specify which PatchMix to use, it would probably make sense to use the 1.71 PatchMix, or whatever the latest version available for the particular card is on the normal E-MU site. The one E-MU site thing I saw that mentioned regressing to the 1.60 drivers said nothing about regressing to PatchMix 1.60, and only supplied the 1.60 patch for the drivers, not for PatchMix.

While I saw the note on the Asian site a day or so back, I decided I'd wait on the new drivers until they make it to the emu.com site, just to be safe, and also give a bit more runtime on the regression to 1.60 since it is, thus far, running smoothly, but not enough time has passed to suggest it has actually changed anything with respect to the likelihood of power-up failures.

Rick

One minor update:

I just upgraded to the V1.80 drivers late this afternoon and noticed one decided improvement compared to past driver upgrades and what I'd mentioned in my CakewalkNet review of the 1820M: Even after the first reboot for the driver activation, the sound worked right away. With past updates there was a need to run Restore Defaults to get the sound back after each driver upgrade (and the 1.71 driver upgrade had other problems as mentioned in the thread on the E-MU forums). This seems like an encouraging sign.

As for the power-up failures, I am still running fine, with no further failures, since last Friday morning, most of that with the 1.60 drivers, but the last two cold boots with the 1.80 drivers. It isn't even a week yet, so it's too soon to suggest getting the 1.71 drivers out of the picture has definitively solved anything (not to mention I did reseat all my connections to the E-MU hardware as suggested by E-MU support, so it's conceivable that could have made a difference, too).

Rick

I install 1.8 drivers and 1.71 dsp 2 days ago.

I now have no problem switching between 41.1 and 48 projects.

With the 1.6 drivers I would have ocassions of Sonarpdr.exe stuck or ASIO connections not being available after a crash.
I have not been able to test if sonar disconnects from the asio drivers upon a crash, as I haven't had a crash.
At this point I am not sure if there are improvements in the drivers that are making Sonar more stable, or if I haven't hit the right trigger for Sonar to fail, but am very optimistic Emu is on the right track.

Don

tsf -
The 1616M isn't listed on the EMU website yet, so I can't say about support.
However, a few days back, ICHi wrote:

I was wondering if the 1616 will use the same (or slightly modified) drivers as the PCI versions, or if they will need new drivers that have to be written from scratch ..?
***They are part of the family so they will include the latest version of PatchMix and the Drivers 1.80. All the enhancements and fixes of the 1616 will be available to PCI DAS users in the form of the next 2 updates.

From that, I assume the 1.8 fixes will be available for the 1616M, but don't know the details.

From other posts on the 1616m forum, it sounds like the 1616m preamps are much better than the 1820M preamps. (Soft-limiting available for the A/D, true guitar input, generally better circuit quality). At least, that's what ICHi says -- just passing along his comparison.

You should check out the forum I mentioned: http://www.productionforums.com/emu; it seems to be the most active community focused around the E-MU DAS cards. Be aware that they've banned people for various reasons in the past (and some of those people are very vocal). If you post 1616M questions there, you'll probably get them answered (and E-MU staff have stepped up forum participation recently).

- Jim

Nathan .... replied briefly last night; see the other thread.

- Jim