PCIe sound card options

[ekwipt]

What's in the same ball park as:

Lynx AES16e
RME HDSPe AES
Apogee Symphony 64 PCIe
Digidesign Protools HD

I'm just trying to get my head around possibilities and limitations of each card

[TEMAS]

I went with the new RME AES PCIe card. And it works great.

The Lynx has more limited routing flexibility and some have reported problems with drop outs.

The Symphony can only be used with Apogee converters (I use Lavry).

The Digidesign is for Protools and I'm Logic.

[stag]

ESI - MaXiO 032e

It has only 2000\XP drivers, I could careless. It was my best interface in years, i hope the last one, it feels like i´m pleased.

[357mag]

I hope there will be more PCI Express based sound cards in the future. There is not all that many at the moment. I wonder if E-MU will market one.

[Hard2Hear]

MOTU has also had the 424 PCIe card for some time now. They were the first one using express I think. It will use the 2408, 24io, or HD192 interfaces.

[stag]

Originally Posted by 357mag

I hope there will be more PCI Express based sound cards in the future. There is not all that many at the moment. I wonder if E-MU will market one.

I don´t know what´s happening. Most audio PCIe cards core was previously PCI. They just changed the connectors. Kind of what happened with UAD first PCIe cards.

[ekwipt]

there's a difference with doing this though, a lot of the cards have a pci-pcie bridge (a converter if you will), so i think you're still bottlenecked in the output

The RME and Lynx are definately full pcie, i thknk they only need to run in 1x speed though

[KingDiamond]

Originally Posted by 357mag

I hope there will be more PCI Express based sound cards in the future. There is not all that many at the moment. I wonder if E-MU will market one.

I think E-MU is rumored to be getting out of the audio interface market altogether.

[waltermusik]

Originally Posted by ekwipt

there's a difference with doing this though, a lot of the cards have a pci-pcie bridge (a converter if you will), so i think you're still bottlenecked in the output

The problem is usually not the PCI bandwidth (33MHz * 32bit means 150 parallel audio streams at 32/96 full duplex, given the bandwidth can be fully used) but rather that the PCI bus is shared among several devices, such as USB connectors, soundcards, DSP cards causing competition for resources ("interrupts") and thus higher-than-necessare latency.

PCI-Express, on the other hand (given it is fully implemented on the motherboard) provides a point-to point connection with the CPU so there is no bus anymore to share between devices.

So, PCIe, given it is well done, is better than PCI regardless of the bandwidth question.

A remark about EMU: EMU and Creative are the same company, and Creative was one of the first to put out a PCIe soundcard (no idea what it sounds like, though), and is still the only one that is not severely overpriced (given it works, which I don't know).

[ekwipt]

great thanks for the clarity