soundcard for Windows 7

Anybody suggest a good low latency soundcard compatible with Windows 7?

(My good old 2.6GHz P4 with Windows XP is struggling with the Concert Grand Piano and I plan to buy a computer with one of the new 6-core processors, but I understand that people are having problems with latency in W7.)

Any advice would be gratefully received.

 

I use an acer m3300 with athlon sixcore processor.
This has a Realtek HD onboard and this provides a working wavert driver.
This works well with ASIO4ALL.

I have also an edirol UA 4FX USB interface and this can also work with low latency, but it will produce crackles sometime. Becouse this has considerable output latency the processing latency is very small and it has high CPU load. The driver runs on on core only and produces periodic peaks of 100% CPU usage. (Ok, I have 5 other idle cores leftover, hehe...)
I compared the sound. I routed the realteks output into the edirols input, so both share the amplifier and headphone. In kontakt I can switch the ASIO interface easily and do a realtime A/B comparison. There is no audible difference in soundquality. It was, however some work to eliminate groundloops and background noise.

For future however, I intend to get an ESI Juli@ (The m3300 has two free PCI 5V slots)
I think this is the best solution because it has TRS as well as Chinch connectors balanced and unbalanced interfaces and MIDI.
Here in germany e.g. at musicstore it is available for around 100 Euro.
See here:

http://www.esi-audio.com/products/julia/

There is another aspect that must be mentioned:
With both soundcards I get totally clean sound with low latency and IVORY (I).
In Kontakt I get occasional crackles with the same latency. With the Edirol more than with the Realtek.
This is not much disturbing it is like a high quality Vinyl Phono.

It seems that Kontakt is not good when the /processing/ latency goes below 5-3ms. At 3ms processing latency Kontakt has to refill the buffer 300 times per second. There seems to be a limit here. Kontakt sometimes has high CPU load and fails to refill the buffer in time sometimes.
So the limiting factor for latency seems to be Kontakt. Even if the soundcard had zero latency this would probably happen. Would be interesting to know if this is better with MACOSX or with an Intel I7, but I dont believe it.

Possibly a fast SSD could improve this. Or could a Seagate Momentus with inbuilt 4GB flash cache do the job? This is much cheaper and has much more capacity. But I cannot buy all expensive hardware that this world has to offer on a pure trial and error approach, just for to see that it doesnt hold what was promised. Some reasonable and reliable advice and techical information, e.g for optimal disk latency and transfer speed and optimal cluster and sector layout would be needed here.

Peter

 

Echo Gina 3g

 

Thanks a lot that's very helpful.

 

I'm using RME Multiface II on Win7 64 Bit with very low latency.

 

M-Audio Audiophile 192. Rock steady W7 64 bit drivers. "M Audio's Audiophile 192 offers the best audio performance I've measured to date in this price range" Sound on Sound.

 

Disable AMD Cooln Quiet!

Hi,

just managed to remove the last crackles and to reduce latency further:

I disabled "AMD Cool'n Quiet" in the BIOS.

I use now these Values:

Realtek HD + ASIO4ALL in (WaveRT pull mode):
Prozessing Buffer: 160 Samples@48000 -> 3.3ms
Output latency 0.7ms (I think that is the conversion time of the DAC and has nothing to do with buffers.)

Edirol UA 4FX USB soundcard (equal to Cakewalk UA 4FX):
Prozessing Buffer: 160 Samples@48000 -> 3.3ms
Output latency 3ms (I think that is the USB buffer + protocol overhead.)

I stream the samples from the internal system disk. This is a 1TB disk drive and at the outer rim it is pretty fast: >100MB/s 13ms latency. This works currently. If however, the disk becomes fuller it might be necessary to use a dedicated drive.
I plan to use a seagate momentus.

So no new soundcard and no expensive SSD is required for me.
I am really happy now. This CPU is terrific for Audio. It stays cool even with Cooln quiet disabled and the fan stays quieter than my laptop. Average CPU load is very low but in peak load situations it does the job. No DPC spikes. I run it over night playing MIDIfiles with Network disabled and the maximum value was 680µs.


HTH,

Peter

 

EDIROL/Cakewalk UA-4FX

Ok, finally, after disabling AMD cooln quiet I found that the SN ratio of the onboard sound is good enough for average music but not for demanding pianissimo when the amplification is turned up.

The Edirol UA-4FX works now fine without any crackles at 3.3ms processing latency and 1 ms output latency. This is the lowest setting that it supports. This works only if no hub is inbetween.
Sound is absolutely clean and I can do 500 voices with Vintage D before crackling starts. Thats much more than needed and so I decided to stay with the edirol USB interface. At this setting it causes 100% CPU load spikes on one core but that doesnt hurt the other 5 cores are idle ;-) and sound is absolutely clean.
It can do more than 1000 voices, but for this latency must be set high.

This computer is 3 times faster, than I would have needed ;-)

So I can finally recommend the UA-4FX for this computer. It has the advantage that it has various inbuilt DSP effects and Bass Treble adjustment, thats very fine to listen online Music.

Edit:
It has no crackles but dropouts when windows are opened or the mouse is over a link and that is highlighted. The onboard sound with ASIO4all did not have this. It looks as if I need a PCI soundcard...

Peter

 

This is all very helpful. Thanks.

 

Hi Stephen,

I am glad when this helps.

I have now found my final setup:

I interconnected the frame grounds of my piano (I use the inbuilt speakers), the frameground of my USB soundcard and the frameground of my PC with a solid low resistance cable connection. I used screws and 4mm connectors, those that are used for measuring instruments. This gives much better connection than the USB and Audio cables and prevents unnecessary current flowing over the audio ground.

This removed all noise. The Realtek HD is much better than its reputation. in this configuration it has very good S/N ratio and there is no difference in sound quality against my Edirol UA 4FX interface. (Of course this also depends from the PC's construction) The Acer aspire M3300 is marketed as a multimedia computer and obviously they took some care about SNR and soundquality. Might be, it is not so good for recording, but I dont do this, dont know it.

With the Realtek HD I get the lowest latency, because it is directly PCI connected.
So I use this with ASIO4All as my dedicated ASIO interface. ASIO4ALL grabs the Realtek exclusively and so I cannot listen online tutorials and so on while it is active. So I routed the output of the realtek into the UA-4FX. I use the UA-FX as my windows default soundcard and as a breakout box for the realtek interface.

This works without limitations now. Additionally I got the advantage that I can now use the USB-MIDI interface of my piano without disturbing noise.
(Previously I used a standard MIDI connection).

This is what I finally ended up with. No new soundcard, no expenses, but some really hard work and experimenting!

Peter

 

The Concert Grand patch has a bug that gives it pops and clicks, etc.

You have to disable the LP2 filter...(I think that is the one)

I made a post about it under the Kontakt section...

I have a 6 core computer and it helps none without the fix.

 

Here is the post.

http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=119266

 

@madAhorn:

This probably has nothing to do with the soundcard.
Sound is absolutely clean here with Vintage D, as well withthe inbuilt as with the USB device. However, the inbuilt has moch lower latency and less CPU usage.
Not that CPU usage is a problem, but the USB runs on one core only and when the usage for this core reaches 100%, then dropouts (but no crackles) can happen.

There are two things that can cause crackles:
1. When internet explorer is used and a link is highlighted. IE will then automatically pop the window into foreground. This causes 4ms DPC glitches that are measurable and audible.

2. When AMD Cooln quiet is enabled in the BIOS and CPU usage is high. Because Kontakt can have higher peak usage, Cooln quiet must be disabled here.

No other problem here DPC average is 125µs when Network is enabled and Antivir and searchindexer are running, USB power saving enabled ....
Nothing else has to be adjusted with this CPU and Windows7 64 Bit.
I think this outperforms XP, because XP does not run the audio thred with multimedia priority and does not have low prioity disk access for background processes, it could not do this.

Im really happy with that, all problems are history.
Only problem is this computer consumes 104W without display .... ;-)

 

This is probably elementary but when putting a new audio card into a new computer be aware that PCIe is not the same as PCI. I got my new computer and a Juli@ soundcard and it doesn't fit the PCIe slots!

It seems quite hard to find a PCIe card at a sensible price with ASIO drivers that don't cause problems in Windows 7.

 

I just ordered this. Was recommended to me at Sweetwater sound. $120. Not sure how well it works in Win7 but I ordered an upgrade to Professional that allows you to work in XP mode so it should be OK.

E-MU 0404 PCIe
PCIe Interface with 24-bit/192kHz Resolution and Built-in Effects — PC Only

 

I'm using RME HDSP9632 PCI on W7 x64 with no issues

 

Thanks for your help fellers.

 

Re:E-MU 0404 PCIe
PCIe Interface with 24-bit/192kHz Resolution and Built-in Effects — PC Only -- Its working fine in Win 7 w/a beta download from their site (install over the CD install).

RE: Cooln Quiet (Intel chips have something similar) -- On my unit you cant disable it in Bios. But you can choose high performance in the control panel. See the NI page below -- it help me greatly. See #9.

http://www.native-instruments.com/knowledge/questions/847/Windows+7+Tuning+Tips+for+audio+processing

 

No latency here and others I know also no latency. Latency would be the sound card and drivers not win7. win7 is fine for audio, I love it. And I have a cheapo M Audio AP24969Well 2 actually installed and synced) never an issue with latency or anything else actually
Win 7x64

 

i am running windows 7 64 bit professional and the e-mu beta drivers crashed all the time and I had to revert back to the default vista drivers given to me when I got my emu 1616m pcie card. Those run stable the whole time.