OT: E-MU 1820M or ?

Hi,

Running XP SP2 and Sonar 6. I'm looking at buying this PCI interface... I don't have Firewire.

Are the EM-U drivers solid with this unit now?
What about its DSP.... is it usable as a total mixdown option?
Does the onboard soft limiting feature work well?

I don't believe RME offers a similar interface without the need for a mic preamp or breakout cable (an extra expense). However, I'm not ruling them out since they are considered high-end. Thanks for any help.

Jon

I'm looking at buying this PCI interface... I don't have Firewire. check out a firewire pci card, not expensive

Are the EM-U drivers solid with this unit now? I think so
What about its DSP.... is it usable as a total mixdown option? not sure why you would usie it for mixdown, I do that in sonar
Does the onboard soft limiting feature work well? 1820m didn't advertise this when I bought in a couple years ago, look at the 1616m

I don't believe RME offers a similar interface without the need for a mic preamp or breakout cable (an extra expense). However, I'm not ruling them out since they are considered high-end. Thanks for any help.

On the limiting thing, I read something interesting the other day, the point of the article was that in order to record at high digital level, you would have to overdrive your preamps, resulting in lower quality sound. I believe that. The quality of my recordings improve greatly when I started recording with known peaks between -12 to -6db.

ORIGINAL: JWB

Are the EM-U drivers solid with this unit now?

Theyr'e ok, my brothers been using it for a couple of years relatively problem free at about 5.ms ASIO, but they're a bit Pci intensive for my taste. Make sure you have a high bandwidth chipset or you'll probably run into some problems, or wind up running it at higher than 5ms.

What about its DSP.... is it usable as a total mixdown option?

The onboard DSP sucks in my opinion, and works very awkwardly(all effects are called up in their shell plugin),and the DSP chip isn't very powerful at all as far as plugin instances, not that you'd want to use these plugs anyway. At the time, you bought this unit for it's converters and price and not much else, but now you can get a PCI FW card and a Presonus Firebox or TC Konnekt8(both at 299.00) for about $320.00-$330.00(extra $20-30 is for the FW card) and get the same quality or better. Although PCI solutions are less taxing at lower latenceys than FW, this is not the case for the EMU. I'd personally go with either of the latter in the $400-$500 price range, unless the EMU sampler option appeals to you, and I know the Mic Pre's on the Presonus FireBox are better, and I hear the TC Konnekt 8 are in the same ballpark, but with more features.

Well thanks a lot for the info. The TC Konnekt series looks awsome! I don't have any experience with their products except name recognition. Apparently the TC Konnekt 24D's DSP effects (from PowerCore) can be edited within the host (Sonar). IYO, would it be worth the extra money ($200) to have them?

Jon

ORIGINAL: JWB

Well thanks a lot for the info. The TC Konnekt series looks awsome! I don't have any experience with their products except name recognition. Apparently the TC Konnekt 24D's DSP effects (from PowerCore) can be edited within the host (Sonar). IYO, would it be worth the extra money ($200) to have them?

Jon

From what I hear, the DSP chip isn't that powerful as far as instances go, but the quality should be there. Here's an online review by Craig Anderton at Harmony Central. http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1437808

I ordered an 1820m on Friday so I can't give you any real experience but did quite a bit of online research and am quite confident it was a good choice for me. Searching this forum for 1820m, I found no unresolved problems with it. You can download the manual from emu's site. It's been around for a several years and I expect the asio drivers to be very stable by now.

Here's a pretty comprehensive analysis/review: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/creative-emu-1820/

OTOH, if you really want firewire device and have an available pci slot, the firewire cards are very inexpensive.

I´ve had the 1820m for 2 months now, and I have been really pleased with the quality of the product. In Denmark hardware is extremely expensive, so I researched a lot to find the soundcard which suited me best. The 1820m is cheap, powerful and has nice preamps.

If you´re budget is limited I would truly recommend it

However, I do have a pretty powerful machine too.

good luck

mathias

I just replaced my 1212M with a PreSonus Firebox. The Firebox has better sound quality and much more efficeint drivers. With the EMU stuff you have to load the mixer app (PatchmixDSP) to use the sound card at all and it is a total resource hog. With the Firebox you only have to use their mixer app if you want to do hardware mixing in the Firebox. I never had any real problems with my EMU card but I get better performance in Sonar with my Firebox. Plus the preamps in the Firebox are way better than any of the EMU boxes.

The only real tricks I know in using the PreSonus stuff is that they work best with either a TI or VIA firewire chip and they don't like sharing a firewire card with other devices. I only have my Firebox on my firewire card so I have not had any issues.

I've got the 1820m, upgraded from 1820 since it's an end of life product and it was on sale (299 euros). If you're not planning on using the midi sync card and you can't get it for a sales price the 1616m pci is the better choice (not EOL/warranty/parts plus most notably better preamps (true HiZ for (bass) guitar etc).

ORIGINAL: Abe

I've got the 1820m, upgraded from 1820 since it's an end of life product and it was on sale (299 euros). If you're not planning on using the midi sync card and you can't get it for a sales price the 1616m pci is the better choice (not EOL/warranty/parts plus most notably better preamps (true HiZ for (bass) guitar etc).

abe, not sure wha you mean by true hi-Z. the 1820m also has Hi-Z and it work fine for recording bass/guitar.

1820M
Line Input:
- Input Impedance: 10Kohm
- Max Level: +17dBV (19.2dBu)
- Gain Range -12 to +28dB

1616M
Hi-Z Line Input:
- Input Impedance: 1Mohm
- Max Level: +18dBV (20.2dBu)
- Dynamic Range (A-weighted, 1kHz, min gain): 118dB
- Signal-to-Noise Ratio (A-weighted, min gain): 118dB
- THD+N (1kHz at -1dBFS, min gain): -105dB (.0006%)

The 10Kohm is too low for connecting a guitar directly (not really a Hi-Z input), it needs to be 1 Mohm.
I didn't know this until I bought Guitarrig2 which has the "true" Hi-Z inputs, guitarrig2 sounded quite a bit more dynamic than through the 1820m (bypassing the rig audio interface). Maybe have a look at the unofficial emu forum http://www.productionforums.com/index.php?f=52 1616M is the better choice of the two now(!).

I've had a 1820M since it first came out. I love the sound of the converters. The FX, while not great are useful if you have a singer who wants to hear reverb or other FX in their cue mix, while you record them dry into Sonar. When I first got it, the drivers were terrible. I had to build an Intel based computer to accomodate the card. My older AMD XP2400 and VIA chipset didn't work properly.

They've fixed all the driver problems now and I'm very pleased with the card. Too bad I had to wait almost a year for them to get it right. Now I have it running on a Core 2 Duo system and it works great.

CA

BTW, I'm having a he** of a time finding a 1616m PCI online for sale. Is this a NEW product?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2000010073+1187112437&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=73

Doesn't need to be pci, could put a pcmcia pci card in your desktop.

Thanks but I'll probably go the PCI route. My computer is somewhat problematic right now. If I go Firewire I'll change my motherboard. The Gigabyte K8N is not as stable as my Asus boards were .

ORIGINAL: JWB

BTW, I'm having a he** of a time finding a 1616m PCI online for sale. Is this a NEW product?

Yes the pci version is only a few months old (1616m pcmcia is maybe 1.5 years old).
I don't know where you live but www.froogle.com or www.froogle.co.uk might be a start.
Mind that the 1616m breakout box has an external power adapter.
The original 1820m price was 499 dollars/euros I think the 1616m pci price is 449 dollars/euros.
You will not find the 1616m pci on sale though.

I am using a 1616m Cardbus for both laptop and desktop - I have a generic PCI-to-Cardbus adaptor in the desktop. I am sure there are lots of technical reasons why I should not do this, which I am risking being informed about here, but it seems to work perfectly well. The unit sounds great. The DSP is not really much to get excited by, I don't end up using it much / at all, but the featureset otherwise and the sound quality overall more than make up for it. Patchmix is very flexible once you get used to it but I wouldn't use it for mixing overall. Maybe for handling stems though...