forget about a soundblaster for anything real working with a DAW. Period, full stop.

RME makes PCI-e cards. there is your answer unless you can't afford. Multiface 2 isn't that expensive considering.

Creative updated their ASIO driver. I have the X-Fi and I get 2 ms latency. If you can get lower, congrats. The only think I don't like is no RCA outputs. Makes my monitors useless unless I get a 2.1 gaming system (not), or an amp with digital in.

ESI 1010 PCIe

Exactly.
And it is not really fair to say that the new alternatives to the old king of the non-pro market, the $95 M-Audio 2496, are the current $300-$500+ options available now.
I doubt RME saw a huge jump up in sales once the M-Audio/Maya options werent around. However, I bet sales of all externals are now through the roof.

[quote="highkoo"]

Esi still have the maya and julia in production though - both pcie and pci. Sure they're not in he same league as an rme, but a perfectly viable replacement for the m-audio at the same price level

X-Fi Titanium has phono out for none digital stereo amplifiers you dont need a digital cable for it.

ASIO on the creative X-FI Titanium is 2MS in total. I have to set it higher so the 3.6Ghz i7 has time to keep up with it.

It can run a DAW at 44khz 48, 96 or 192khz

I use U-he DIVA and Omnisphere and many others in Ableton live 8 also tried Studio One 2 with mixes 9GB in size and many tracks no problems with this card.

The only diference I can see on cards for music production is they have many sockets to plug hardware synthesizers in and thats it.
Last edited by Kaboom75 on Sat Aug 18, 2012 7:57 am; edited 1 time in total

Are they actually still making them?
They Maya is listed on their site, but the only places that seem to have it 'in stock' are lesser known sites. Its not at many places and it lists as discontinued at some.

thomann.de show plenty of stock : http://www.thomann.de/gb/esi_maya_44_xte.htm

So did Creative fix their ASIO drivers under 64-bit Windows?

Mine have run like a champ.

Never had driver problems with creative cards in 11 years using them.
Some people use the low budget X-FI gamer which is an 8 year old card with a driver that runs proper X-FI features on one of your CPU cores maybe thats why some are a bit iffy with DAWS.

I was asking because when i tested an HP z400 with a Creative PCIe card in it a few years ago, ASIO was disabled in 64-bit windows.

This makes me question the latency of 2ms.

If you can't run it at 2ms I would think that it isn't capable of 2ms.
Why wouldn't a 3.6 Ghz i7 not be able to keep up?

I'd like to think that this card is an option because just about every other manufacturer has abandoned the internal card market in the lower price ranges.

So does that mean they are still making them or what?

I run mine at 3 ms, but if you want any lower.....