Marian Seraph AD2 Pcie Audio Interface

Anything about hardware musical instruments.
RELATED
PRODUCTS

Post

I recently purchased this product which sounds fantastic and has very low latency. Unfortunately it's currently unusable for me and my 10$ guitar port and practice amp are still in usage.

I have been able to run amp sims on it for my guitar, but when I do that all other audio gets shut off. I can't run any media players nothing. This is do to the Asio driver being exclusive. I tried setting channel 1+2 in [ it's supposed to have 32 channels] in windows which works for media players and then setting the Asio driver in my amp sims to 3+4 but I get no sound out of the amp sims. It comes with mixer software and routing which I've fooled around with after reading the manual but no luck being able to use multiple channels so far.

I've got a few days left before I have to send it back, so I want to see if I can get it working as it is a great sounding low latency interface. I found another owner of this interface on another forum and he has the same problem but lives with it. Although the site says the card can run multiple audio sources?

Post

Dunno anything about the card. Sounds potentially a nice piece.

Since you mention ASIO I will assume you are on windows. If your amp sim software will run as a VST Plugin then you could run a DAW program and set up one stereo track in your DAW hosting your amp sim plugin. Many if not most DAWs will let you tell the track to be the "live audio record input" and to playthru the post-FX guitar output mixed with the other tracks. In other words, in most daws your live guitar track would be record-enabled and you told the DAW to mix the track into the main stereo output. This would usually work to thru your guitar into the plugins and then into the main ASIO output even if your current DAW project file is stopped, or playing. It usually isn't necessary to click the DAW record button to get live thru with most of them, so far as I know.

Then in another DAW stereo track, import the song file you want to play along with. Now when you hit play the DAW will mix your playalong pre-recorded track with your live playing track and send the mix of the two out the ASIO. Or you could even hit the record button before playing along so you can rewind and hear how well you played it.

Note that many DAWs let you choose several audio driver methods, of which ASIO is only one. ASIO MAY work better than the other available methods the DAW lets you choose for this purpose. But if you install a new DAW program and you want ASIO, first check to see if ASIO is picked as the DAW's current audio driver. Some DAWs might default install using a windows driver to guarantee that the new customer can always hear sound the first time he fires it up, even if the customer doesn't have any ASIO devices.

Post

I initially got it to work on reaper. At that time I could not run amplitube four in standalone. I was able to run amplitube 4 in i

This is by far the most expensive Audio interface I've tried and ironically the worst. I guess it's for more advanced users than myself who really just want it for practice with amp sims, although maybe there is a reason it's cheaper than RME and Lynx?

Post

Can't seem to post my reply due to spam filter, lol

Post

Sorry about the triple posts the spam filter would not let me post my reply initially.

I got it to work on reaper at first, but then it crashed when I loaded amplitube which at the time I could not work in standalone but now I can. Since the crash it no longer gives any guitar sound in reaper, I've tried it with guitarport and that works.

While that is a temporary fix I want to be able to use youtube videos as well, and I don't it's worth keeping it if it doesn't' work properly. It's the best sounding interface I've heard, very clear, and the latency is low although I'm not sure what how low a typical interface can go for samples. This one can go to 44.1 at 32 samples and be ok on a Ryzen 5 2600.

Post

I do not know current typical latency but historically I think 32 sample "always glitch free" stable operation was vanishingly rare.

Perhaps today it is easier and more common. Maybe someone has valid industry-wide statistics. I would be curious to see a nice statistically valid user latency pie chart or bar graph.

Am not picking on you but on one hand you say it is stable at 32 samples then you say it quit working because of crashing. Maybe I misunderstand the explanation or maybe 32 samples isn't stable under all loads? Possibly work better at bigger buffer setting? It could be tested.

Dunno if it is legal to record audio from youtube for private personal use. AFAIK it remains legal (usa) to record off the radio for private personal use.

I am not a lawyer. People should obey the local laws wherever they live.

If it happened to be legal somewhere on the world to record audio from youtube for private personal use then the excellent free audio editor program Audacity might come in handy.

Post

I'm not recording. I might use a jam track , use a guitar lesson from youtube things like that. I don't record at all I just want a good practice setup.

It plays smooth at 32 samples as long as I run nothing other than the amp sim. 32 at 44.1 is about 3ms latency tested on RTL utility according to someone on this forum who tested it and posted the results.

At the time I put it on reaper I could not run amplitube 4 in standalone, nothing to do with the sample rate. I got it running through reaper, but then it crashed and I haven't been able to get it running in reaper since which is bizarre. I've never had anything like that happen before. Software crashes, but I've never had an app refuse to use a device after a crash though.

The problems I'm having is it wont run both Asio and WMD at the same time. It has 32 channels and supposedly according to Marian Seraphs page it can run multiple audio sources, but I've been unable to do it. I put channel 1+2 for default then 3+4 in my asio apps, but I get no sound out of them. It has a software mixer and router which I think might be the solution to get channels 3+4 to run through the outputs of 1+2 [ I don't really know anything about this stuff] but fiddling around with the mixer and router I've been unable to solve my problem. The guy on here who tested the latency also could not get it to run Asio and WMD, but he was ok with it, for me that is a dealbreaker. I know Lynx cards have the same problem and the solution is the one I mentioned but how and if it can be done on Marian Serpah I dont' know? I've tried the manual, but it has not been helpful, and support just gives vague responses

Post

Hi Tom. I only mentioned recording because if you wanted to play along with a youtube audio track as I described in Reaper or some other DAW, you would have to first record the youtube audio to a temp local audio file so you could load it into at least a temp multitrack project, in order to have the youtube audio in one DAW track and your guitar play-thru on another DAW track.

I like Reaper but am not an expert power user. All daws have plugin "pre scanning" to sanity-check plugins to make a good guess whether the plugin is gonna work without crashing the daw. Users don't like daw crashes and some users will blame a daw for a crash even if the culprit was a poison plugin. Every daw handles such things a little differently.

I don't know for sure about this but it is possible that if Amplitube has once badly crashed Reaper, possibly because of too small buffers or some other reason, possibly Reaper marked Amplitube as a poison plugin and it won't run audio thru Amplitube any more (out of self-defense) until you find out how to tell Reaper to give Amplitube another try. I haven't researched this and maybe Reaper doesn't ever do that, but it is possible, and in the past before retirement I wrote similar self-defense against poison plugins into my own audio programs.

Similarly another self-defense in Reaper, if a track gets louder than default but adjustable +18 dB, possibly because of defective runaway fault in a plugin or weird track patching causing feedback, Reaper will mute that track and that track will stay muted until you clear the problem and tell Reaper to try it again.

The nice thing about Windows audio drivers is that several programs can simultaneously play and all the audio output gets mixed together in a user-friendly easy no-brainer way. The not-nice thing about Windows audio drivers is that it accomplishes that feat by controlling the audio interface, then showing a "audio port" to any program which asks for one, and accepting whatever parameters every program wants to use bit depth and samplerate and buffer size. Then windows resamples and sample converts and buffers and whatever it has to do to get all those possibly different audio streams to agree with each other, then mixes them all together and squirts them out the audio interface.

That is why you usually would expect a Windows audio driver to be well-behaved and stable, but you would not necessarily expect it to have low latency, because windows has to potentially baby-sit and reconcile many entirely different audio streams. Some windows driver modes offer "excelusive" operation that might guarantee lower latency, but if you run a program "exclusive" then it is the same problem you complain about with the ASIO exclusivity.

Dunno if it is still the case, but historically the best odds of low latency would be an ASIO driver exclusively under control of 1 program at a time, with the ASIO driver "owning" the audio interface during the time the driver is open and active.

So people who want the low latency generally expect it to only work one program at a time. If you want to simultaneously run audio from several programs then maybe it can have low latency but I doubt it.

I am not an expert, any of the above could be in serious error.

It sounds like you really want to send the interface back anyway, which is fine. You shouldn't keep it if you don't like it. Maybe somebody who knows more about that interface can chime in.

Post

Here is an idea that might not be fatally weird-- Whatever speaker system you use to listen to the computer-- Does it have mixing capability? Could you hook up two different sources to your monitor speakers and hear both simultaneously? Like a PA system or small mixer or whatever?

lf you can easily listen to two sources at once, then why not set up your computer how you like it for low-latency guitar processor, and then play audio files or youtube on another device? Thataway they would never fight each other.

I can listen to youtube fine on my android phone or android pad or laptop. About anything would do. You could even get a full blown unix Raspberry Pi with keyboard, mouse, monitor and audio interface for a couple hundred bucks. Raspberry Pi will watch youtube all day long, but so will a Kindle Fire, android pad, android phone, iphone, ipad, macbook, pc laptop, whatever. All you need is some little mixer on your monitor speakers so you can plug in two playback devices.

Post

It's not Amplitube reaper wont load, it works fine in reaper with guitar port[audio interface]. For some reason I'm no getting any sound from instruments when I use Marian Serpah AD2 [ Audio interface].

I use headphones, and while that might work it's not ideal as I would like to get the best quality sound into my headphones for the music I'm listening to in order to easily hear it cleary. The audio interface AD2 does come with a built in mixer and Router it has 32 channels, and I think I need to put Asio on one channel and WDM on another, but so far nothing. I've set 1+2 as my default in windows, and then in Amplitube or reaper I've got Marian Seraph AD2 as channels 3+4 but I get no sound doing that. So I'm stumped.

Post

Sorry you are having trouble, sounds puzzling.

Post

now I just get a screeching noise out of my headphones when I open amplitube. If all I can use this for is audio I could just get a much cheaper Asus sound card that probably sounds just as good if not better.

Post

Fixed that by removing old driver for old audio interfaces. Odd that it reacted that way suddenly.

Post

one solution is to get a cheap ASIO USB card to run Tube,
and run both cards into a little mixer.
That's what I do here.
I play to You-Tube all the time atm

-it's a little expensive, but it's a flexible way to set up

If you must just use one soundcard, I recommend a multi channel, multi-client USB one. IMO that is the most futureproof individual card set-up

Post

From their website:
The continuously enhanced driver software includes true multi-client support for ASIO 2.2 and multi-channel WDM Audio / WASAPI with lowest latencies in all software environments. In contrast to competing products, the driver allows multiple audio applications to access the sound system simultaneously via the same or different driver interfaces.
So either their tech support walk you through the hoops to get this actually working, or you return the product and get your money back. Because apparently it doesn't work as advertised.

Some things I would check though:
* use WASAPI instead of WDM for system audio or the browser playing youtube (is that even possible?)
* set sample rates of Windows audio and the ASIO programs the same
We are the KVR collective. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Image
My MusicCalc is served over https!!

Post Reply

Return to “Hardware (Instruments and Effects)”