KVR Audio

dickiefunk · Post by **dickiefunk** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 6:50 pm

Hi. Which of these interfaces has the best audio quality + A/D D/A converters? I may be having a complete clearout of my studio and scaling down due to getting married and moving house. I've been using the Echo Layla 3G with my main studio PC and have the EMU 0404 USB for my laptop. Because I may be getting rid of all my gear my laptop will become my main computer and I might need to upgrade the interface. My laptop only has USB 2.0 ports so my choice is limited.

Is there any better USB 2.0 interface than the EMU 0404 USB? I've heard good things about the Line 6 KB37, MOTU 828mk2 USB and Edirol UA101.
Would I be downgrading my audio quality from my Echo Layla 3G and if yes, by how much?

My budget is £450 $700 tops!

Thanks

whocare · Post by **whocare** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 6:49 am

MOTU rules

calex · Post by **calex** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 7:23 am

Doesn't you PC have a PC Card slot? If so, you can always add firewire by putting in a firewire PC Card. That opens you up to being able to consider more options.

dickiefunk · Post by **dickiefunk** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 10:29 pm

No. My laptop has no way of adding firewire, PCMCIA or PCI which is a shame. It only has 3 USB 2.0 slots!
The Motu does look nice and am wondering if this will be a step up from my EMU0404 USB?

benjamind · Post by **benjamind** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 9:39 am

If your laptop has no PCMCIA slots then it probably has ExpressCard slots, which are good because you can buy an ExpressCard > Firewire adapter card. Here is an example, I've got a URL below for where you can buy one:

http://www.firewire-1394.com/siig-firew ... sscard.htm

See if that works for you. If your laptop has ExpressCard this will add two firewire ports.

Ben

PinothyJ · Post by **PinothyJ** » Tue Mar 06, 2007 11:50 pm

Here is a short article on firewire and USB (and also a bit on PCI at the end) to give you some understand on the three.

I figured you might find this interesting…

LINKS:
http://www.record-producer.com/learn.cfm?a=2966

Jeremy_NSL · Post by **Jeremy_NSL** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 4:05 am

0404 looks pretty good.. $199 at Novamusik, Mac-compatible - this might be the thing to pair with my Mac Pro. I like the fact it has analog limiting on the mic pre's *alot*. I'm not sure which other products have that built-in.

Integratron · Post by **Integratron** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 4:29 am

Jeremy_NSL wrote:0404 looks pretty good.. $199 at Novamusik, Mac-compatible - this might be the thing to pair with my Mac Pro. I like the fact it has analog limiting on the mic pre's *alot*. I'm not sure which other products have that built-in.

I'd be satisfied just to find a quality Vista compatible audio/MIDI card for around $100!

lordvader48 · Post by **lordvader48** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 4:51 am

We have had really poor results with USB 2.0 audio interfaces here. It seems that the USB implementation of all these things may be the problem. USB audio interfaces are designed/built to make use of an "asynchronous channel" provided by the USB 2.0 protocol. The problem is not so much latency, but jitter. What happens under heavy CPU loads is that the USB audio and MIDI streams are delivered with aggregate latency that is alright, but there can be a lot of jitter in the timing. Because of these timing problems we have stopped trying to use USB audio interfaces here. We still currently have a USB MIDI interface, but this too is proving to have less-than-great timing.. once again the problem is jitter.

Firewire does not have this particular problem. Also, because the transfer rate is so much higher, the latency should be lower as an added benefit. If you don't have a Firewire card, get one. They're about 15 bucks. PCI is still by far the best and most performant option, but you're on a laptop so that's not an option. If you do go ahead and get a USB 2.0 audio interface, you can expect it to work okay under light CPU loads.

Jeremy_NSL · Post by **Jeremy_NSL** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 6:17 am

With vsts and hosts that are sample-accurate using ASIO (virtually all of them are to my knowledge), how can jitter be an issue?

lordvader48 · Post by **lordvader48** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 7:01 am

Jeremy_NSL wrote:With vsts and hosts that are sample-accurate using ASIO (virtually all of them are to my knowledge), how can jitter be an issue?

The "sample accurate" part of what you're referring to would only pertain to on-host processing. The VST system and ASIO are indeed set up so that the timing between host software and VST's/VSTi's is "sample accurate".

Where things can go to hell is at the hardware and driver level. The timing on that asynchronous USB channel is non-deterministic to begin with, that's a given. Noticeable timing problems can arise on a heavily loaded system because the asynchronous USB channel can exhibit significant variation in the time required to transmit the audio data. The ASIO driver for the USB interface has no way to know how timely (or not) the data packets are being delivered on that asynchronous USB channel. Under light loads, this jitter may not amount to much because there's not much variation in transmission time when the system (and USB bus) load is light. But asynchronous USB communications, which are funky anyway, seem to deteriorate rapidly under significant CPU loads on the host and/or with significant USB bus activity.

Sure, the ASIO driver is allegedly supposed to take care of all this somehow, but this is not what we've measured at all, at least with MIDI which is what we've looked at the most. All of the MIDI timing we've seen from various USB MIDI interfaces and on both Mac/Windows is just completely compromised by jitter. Nominal jitter values we've seen are similar to what Sound on Sound reported for USB MIDI interfaces a few years ago, somewhere around 3-11 msec. But under load, this can become significantly higher, sometimes as high as 19 msec. Completely out to lunch for things like drum patterns. Good, correctly working PCI MIDI interfaces show a jitter in the 1-2 msec range (as reported by Sound on Sound), with little or no dependence on load.

As far as *audio* goes, I'm a little more foggy on what the implications of this are. It may be that ASIO driver buffering could straighten this out somehow, but I don't see how it could. After all, it's a hardware problem: the USB asynchronous channel is non-deterministic, and the driver has no way to know how long it actually takes each packet of data to be transmitted to the audio interface. At light loads, it all works fine.

Naturally, the importance of all this depends very much on your use case. For example, if you are writing a song using the Cubase Dotz and your mouse, using nothing but VSTi's, this problem is not even an issue. However, if you're multitracking or doing other things that rely on audio timing, or doing a lot of MIDI like we do, this is a very difficult and important problem.

Arsov · Post by **Arsov** » Thu Mar 08, 2007 7:26 am

I bought 0404 usb, it has good s/n ratio and sounds pretty cool, but I had million problems using it ( heavy cpu usage is one of the major problem, same project on my Creamware Luna II card used 30-40% cpu - on 0404 usb it used 80 - 90 % cpu !!!! :-/ )

I sold my e-mu and decided that I'll never use any usb card again.

Kazass · Post by **Kazass** » Sun Jul 08, 2007 5:22 pm

is heavy cpu usage a known problem with usb 2.0 cards?

ew · Post by ew » Sun Jul 08, 2007 5:33 pm

Kazass wrote:is heavy cpu usage a known problem with usb 2.0 cards?

From all I've been able to tell, CPU usage with USB 2 audio interfaces is mobo/chipset related.
I've used Kore and AK 1 with two machines with the same CPU and RAM but different nVidia chipsets (one nF4 and the other a 430/610 north/southbridge routine with the onboard graphics disabled), and the CPU usage was practically three times as much with the latter. On my nF570, the CPU usage is even higher despite having a faster processor (a 4600x2 vs a 3500+ in the other two). YMMV...

ew

morphex · Post by **morphex** » Sun Jul 08, 2007 6:38 pm

I have to admit that IMO, E-MU's 0404 USB audio/midi interface packs a lot of punch without costing a lot of money ($199). The converters are clean and can operate at up to 24-bit/192kHz, you get Class-A low-noise preamps and from what I've read, it features an ultra-low jitter clock (which was mentioned earlier and is very important). Drivers are available for Windows (including x64) as well as Universal Binary drivers for the new Macs.

What really blows my mind is the amazing software bundle that's included. You get Cubase LE, Sonar LE, Live Lite 4, Melodyne Essential, Wavelab Lite, Peak Express 5, Amplitude LE, SFX Machine Lite, and E-MU's Proteus VX. This makes the 0404 a great buy for someone who's just starting out.

You mentioned MOTU's 828mkII USB 2 version...I honestly think you would be able to hear an improvement in the sound quality, but the MOTU unit is something I would suggest because of the massive amount of I/O and connectivity options. It can also be used as a stand-alone mixer without needing a computer. But at $749, do you or will you ever need that much I/O? You could easily record a small band with this one box, and it would not only sound great but, MOTU is well-known for providing up to date and rock-solid driver support. But it sounded like in your post that you were stripping-down your system. So wouldn't this be a little overkill?

The main problem I see with your laptop is only having USB ports. So you connect a USB audio-interface, then a USB MIDI keyboard controller/tactile surface, got any external hard drives...oh, and don't forget about any dongles you might have or may need to buy along with a future software purchase. See where I'm going here? We're talking about a serious bottleneck in the making if you're not cautious.

So, if you need more I/O go with the MOTU, you won't regret it. But if your needs are much more modest, I would keep what you have, or if for some reason you just don't like the 0404, there's other options. I'm not very familiar with other USB audio-interfaces so I will let someone else make a suggestion. Good luck, I hope you find the right product for your needs.

Peace - morphex

Any better USB 2.0 interfaces than EMU 0404 USB?