Having spent a bit more time with it, I'll update this a bit.dsan@mail.com wrote:Here is one I'm looking at(because of the FW reasons you mention) and has been recommended by Kaine from Scan Pro in at least two threads here which I feel pretty good about:
https://www.zoom-na.com/products/studio ... -converter
It has nice specs, has drivers for W10 and ElCapitan! znd gets decent reviews around the web.
I still recommend it for the reasons I more than likely listed previously (great AD/DA for the price, great latency, great price in general), but I've had one disappointment with it, although it's not really something Zoom can do much about.
The early motherboard implimentations of USB3 were carried out by a number of firms who offered controller chips based around the rough standard, but that didn't really get nailed down until Intel issued their own implimentation natively. I have to note that short of RME (who from my own experience ran into a few issues with the more obscure controllers, that took a while to solve) everyone else held off releasing USB 3 interfaces until the dust settled.
Zoom were one of those firms and it appears to have been largely tested & validated on the Intel controller. The Zoom product box advises running it on a native Intel USB3 controller for the best performance and they are not joking around with that statement. On every single X99 / Z97 / Z170 board I've hooked one up to, its been absolutely flawless. I took one home to try on my own X79 box and spent three days banging my head against the none native ASMedia branded controller which it really didn't like.
Now I know a number of users who have had good luck in running it on older gens native USB 2 controllers and to be fair when connected to usb 2 it adds less than a single ms to the RTL, which means this thing pretty much outperforms all of the USB 2 interfaces as well on a USB 2 controller, however I wasn't one of those lucky ones.
Now we've sold easily triple digits of these in the last few months and the return rate for incompablity reasons has been 1% so far, so it looks like I was bloody unlucky with my configuration, and if its hooked up to any Intel board from the last 18 - 24 months it'll be absolutely fine (mines a Asus board from early 2012), but I feel its only fair warning if your weighing up your options based on my comments.
On a side note, to those questioning up top why USB3 uptake was so slow.... well that's your answer! I'm sure this won't just apply to Zoom as those early USB3 implimentations were all over the place and I've seen similar problems with other none audio kit in the past for exactly the same reason.
