Apple's own soundcard

[Ninja]

Dear forum,

I'm trying to investigate the quality of the internal soundcard that ships with the G5.

I have two uad-1 cards and a TC PowerCore (all PCI cards) so I don't have any more room in the computer and would have to get a firewire sollution. The only thing is - I could live with two inputs and outputs for a while.

I would be using the optical connections with a high quality DA and AD converter.

Can it output 44.1/24-bit ? Can it record that aswell ?

How about latencies ? I'd be using alot of VSTi softsynths...

Any comments highly appreciated! I need to make up my mind fairly quick on this subject, so the sooner the better!

Thanks!

 

[G]

....well one word of warning about your firewire suggestion is that UA's own support docs suggest that the UAD has more problems on a G5 with a Firewire or USB device than with PCI.
As for the internal optical I/O - I'm not a qualified expert exactly, but all my experience with these things would lead me to say that \"yes, 44.1/48KHz should be fine\". \"Yes you can record through it\" and as long as the AD and DA that you wire up to it are good quality, your audio will be good quality. As for latency, very often in the past, mac internal I/O has had very good latency under OS X, often better than dedicated I/O. It was just that the mic inputs were noisy as hell!
Good luck
Gareth

 

[arimaka]

I don't know why... but I can load more plugins using my lynx AES-16 than when using built in audio as the coreaudio driver for logic...

just my 2 cents
manuel

 

[Ninja]

Gareth and Manuel: Thanks for commenting.

I'm not suprised that a RME or LYNX card gives better latency than the internal soundcard. Their architecture probably allows them to use less resources also, so that you'll be able to use more plugins.

I'd still like a definite answer though as to wheter it will output and accept true 24-bit 44.1 signals and what minimum latencies I can expect to work with.

Thanks!

 

[arimaka]

Gareth and Manuel: Thanks for commenting.

I'm not suprised that a RME or LYNX card gives better latency than the internal soundcard. Their architecture probably allows them to use less resources also, so that you'll be able to use more plugins.

I'd still like a definite answer though as to wheter it will output and accept true 24-bit 44.1 signals and what minimum latencies I can expect to work with.

Thanks!

I was not talking about latency...
I said that I could run more plugins... now i add that especially those on my UAD-1 cards...

latency really isn't a factor for playback...
it's only a factor when recording... The optical port on the G5 works great @ 24-bit 44.1 in my opnion... I use it with my benchmark converter to play back all audio from computer, itunes, etc... it works wonderfully...

For recording i believe it is practical but not the best option. I believe at certain sample rates it can not clock to an external source, which would be pointless if you have good converters... it would re-clock the signal to whatever clock is inside the g5...

Not sure if it would work well with latency of softhsynths... i do believe u can set the buffer pretty low (64 samples) which is decent latency, but again like i said i can load more plugins on the lynx card... it all depends on how much of a difference that makes and u would have to test that for yourself...

my 2 cents
manuel

 

[Ninja]

Manuel: Regarding latency - Neither was I. Read my post again. :wink:

Thank you for the input. It's very much appreciated indeed !

You say that the internal soundcard won't clock to \"certain sample rates\". I'd be using 44.1 pretty much all the time... Maybe 96 some times... Hopefully that won't be a problem either, but by the time it might become one, I'm sure I'll be using another soundcard.

For the meantime I'll be connecting it to a RME ADI-2 and use that as the clock master.

Thanks again!