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TC Near ASIO driver is not as stable as M-Audio's Delta driver when you are hammering your computer with high CPU load. I think Delta is different from Audiophile drivers but I mention this because I have a Delta 1010 and a StudioKonnekt 48 and most of my old projects were over 85% CPU load and most of them I can't playback on the Konnekt 48 without the audio dropping out. These are not ASIO buffer underruns and they are not DPC spikes either. TC Near just doesn't seem to handle high CPU load as well as the Delta in my observation.
I also recommend googling 'DPC spike checker' and running that whilst you are mixing. Check it occasionally to see if you do get serious spikes and if you do then the Konnekt may not be the best choice (or any DICEII firewire interface for that matter). The recent versions of TC Near do have safe mode drivers that you can use to deal with DPC spikes (if you get them) but they all add a tonne of hidden latency.
M40 Reverb is nice though, it doesn't have any latency and it can be run as a plugin like any other VST. If you are wondering whether you are missing out on Fabrik C and Fabrik R, don't worry about that. I never use them because they have a freakishly bad roundtrip latency that makes them unusable in plugin mode. We are talking latency on the order of seconds, not milliseconds. Fabrik is only usable for direct monitoring.
Finally, if you are wondering whether the sound quality will improve, I don't really notice any difference between a 1010 and a Konnekt 48 given the same bit depth and sampling rate. If there is a difference its too small for me to care about and it could be confused with being a perceptual thing rather like how triangle sandwiches always taste better than square ones (even though its the same ham, butter and bread).
Big advantage of the Konnekts is that you get tonnes of features for the price in a small package. I can't think of many souncards that give you quite as much bang for the buck. You get instrument level inputs, built in preamps, M40 reverb, direct monitoring, headphone out, metering on the control surface so you don't have to alt tab between windows to see your input levels etc. Also the software mixer (TC Near) is quite flexible and gives you many routing options.
Contrast that with my 1010 and I got no preamps, no headphone out, no hardware metering, no mic/instrument inputs. Its stable in windows XP at low latencies and I think its a great soundcard but its old and lacks alot of stuff which is now standard for the sake of convenience. Also, its PCI so you can't go completely mobile with it. I think you can power a Konnekt 6 off a firewire bus so you can literally stuff a Konnekt 6, laptop and mic into a backpack and go field recording.
Last edited by Derivative on May-02-2010 at 16:49
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