People, please do not confuse the Turtle Beach Pinnacle, with the Pinnacle brand !

The venerable old TB Pinnacle (one of the last of the ISA sound-cards) has 20 bit converters (and 24 bit padded-capable drivers) that in subjective audio quality rivals many of the 'average' 24 bit cards of today !

Eh, Peter ;-)

geoff

Can anyone comment on Aardvark stuff? I'm looking at those right now.

- pup

I can tell you that the aardvark usb-3 works for stereo in/out with vegas, not multichannel of course....

nice to see someone having luck with "creative marketing" midiman products.

I would add Soundscape mixtreme to the list of the good stuff

A friend of mine (Sequoia user) is flicking his Delta 1010 in favour of a MOTU 2408/3 . Not sure of his reasons, but suspect driver/support problems. He borrowed my 2408/2 to satisfy himself that it all did work OK on his system.

Poor bastard - prior to his 1010 he suffered a Lexicon Core2 for 9 months or more - never did get it to work despite changing mobos and everything to the supposed most 'compatibles' !

geoff

Using the Edirol UA-5 here. 24/96, hybrid XLR inputs with phantom power, ASIO, USB. Sounds nice and clean and works great with Vegas, has very clean inputs and preamps. Setup was a breeze, essentially worked right out of the box. It's not overly expensive, and USB connection also makes it quite portable, which was a requirement for me. I'm a former SB live user, and the difference has been remarkable.

-momo

Like to hear of folks with Win2k or XP and their experience with MOTU stuff. I know one dealer who won't sell to Windows users because he told me they always bring them back. He may have meant the 896 firewire model only, but I don't think so.

I use an M-audio card now under Win2k and it works very well for me.

Metric Halo, but they only have Mac drivers.

Marvel

My last experience with MOTU was back in 2001 when I manically buggered their tech staff to find out when they were releasing W2K drivers for their MOTU Midi Xpress. After a year of broken promises I sold it and bought an Emagic AMT-8 instead, and that was the end of my MOTU story.

I got the impression that they're having some difficulties keeping up with Microsoft, but that may have changed nowadays.

We use Creamware Scope systems with no problems. This is a *very* heavy step up for the average dude, and not a cheap one either. It is expanable though. We mainly got this system for it's mixing power. Mixes sound extremely good through it. We don't do any summing in the host app. All the app has to do is route the tracks.

Also the system in general works better when all it has to do is mix, i.e one computer runs your app and plays the files out lightpipe to a second box running the Scope platform. Simple reason...host buss bandwidth. If it can have the PCI buss all to itself it is all the happier for it. The best solution we have found is dividing the roles up over a number of computers. Stability goes waaay up as well. The "one box does it all" thing is great in theory but limited in it's execution.

As an alternative, a much cheaper one at that, I have heard very good reports on the new Echo 24\96 stuff. Not heard them myself yet, but guys I trust say they sound stellar.

If there is *any* way at all you can find someone using a card you are interested in and sweet talk him\her into letting you try it in your particular computer it will pay to go to the trouble ten times over in the end. This is a very flaky business trying to get everything to play nice together.