Which soundcard best for VSTi-based studio: Audigy 2 or Terratec 6Fire or..?!

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-- Which soundcard best for VSTi-based studio: Audigy 2 or Terratec 6Fire or..?!

Posted by Dance123 on Oct-10-2003 20:29:

Which soundcard best for VSTi-based studio: Audigy 2 or Terratec 6Fire or..?!

Hi everybody,

I am gonna buy a new Pentium 4 soon and I am very much in doubt about which soundcard I should buy: the Audigy 2 or Terratec DMX 6Fire or perhaps another one?! I mainly want a soundcard that works well with VST instruments in Cubase. The only hardware I will use for now is a midi controller keyboard for playing the softsynths. So I suppose the most important thing for me will be a good low latency ASIO driver.

So, which soundcard do you recommend? Is it a big disadvantage that the Audigy 2 only has ASIO at 48khz instead of the standard 44.1khz? Also, is it a big disadvantage that the Audigy 2 has only ASIO 1 instead of ASIO 2?!

Also, could anybody please tell me how low latency you can get with these cards and to how low you can tweak this by changing the buffer size or something. Anybody could please explain how this works and which card will get me the lowest latency?! Does this depend on your CPU speed or something (in my case a 2.6Ghz Pentium 4)?..

In case you would recommend a card other then the Audigy 2, please also et me know how well it works with games, esp. EASports games as I like to play those from time to time. Is it true that cards like 6Fire, etc.. can have problems with playing back all sounds in those games because it doesn't have DirectSound build into its hardware or something?..

Any other things I should now, like problems with any of those cards. Also, which card has is the most easy to configure as I want to make music instead of having to waste time tweaking complicated settings etc..

PS: I will use Windows XP in case this matter regarding drivers, etc..

Thanks in advance for all good feedback!

Posted by DeZmA on Oct-12-2003 17:17:

If you're serious about making music forget about the audigy.
I did some testing with my 6fire and in fruity I can play complex songs with 64 samples/buffer which gives me about 1.5 ms latency without cracks (whereas my sblive had problems around 30 ms). I don't use vst's cause everything is hardware so can't tell you how much vst's you can run without cracks. You could also take a look at m-audio range

Posted by hey cheggy on Oct-13-2003 15:05:

Audigy sound cards have latency issues still. Their sound quality is supposed to be a lot better now that Emu have taken over, but latency is still an issue. I'd go the terratec, but have a look at some other stuff on the market. Definitely look at the Delta cards.

Posted by Dance123 on Oct-13-2003 17:12:

Where did you read that the Audigy has latency isues?! I've read some reviews where they said that the Audigy has well-written, low latency ASIO drivers. Only downside is they're fixed at 48khz, but if you only work with VST instruments and set samplerate at 48khz in Cubase I don't see any problem with this card, or am I wrong about that?!

Posted by hey cheggy on Oct-13-2003 17:16:

When I say latency issues, I mean that they are not as low as other cards on the market like M-Audio. I read it from Tweakheadz (and a few other places).

Posted by You aint Ninja on Oct-14-2003 05:01:

Yeah.

Posted by skychild111 on Oct-14-2003 05:05:

hey would the m-audio support up to a 6.1?

Theres a switch on the back of my 6.1 wub that converts 5.1 to 6.1 ... so, would that mean i could use an m-audio for a 6.1 system?

Posted by hey cheggy on Oct-15-2003 02:54:

Don't know. The Audiophile supports 5.1, but you have to get an extra decoder box that doesn't come standard with the card. It then just plugs into the digital out line.