Delta Audiophile
Written: Mar 10 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Low cost. Built in midi interface. Good sound quality.
Cons: Few ins & outs. The price gap up to better cards is getting smaller.
The Bottom Line: A good low cost soundcard with music making in mind.
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| boffo's Full Review: M-Audio Delta DiO 2496 Sound Card |
This Soundcard has become one of the greatest successes for the German company Midiman. The card was created with people who want to make music with their computer in mind.
Being a card with music production as it's primary purpose it has up to 24-bit sound and supports 96K/hz sampling frequency. This ensures that you can record audio with a high quality. This will of course take a lot of harddrive space. 16-bit sound is sufficient for anything except music production but when you're working with music you will want to have the highest possible quality.
This is a budget card meant for people who want to get started making music whitout spending a fortune. This dosen't mean that it compromises when it comes to sound quality. Your recordings will sound good and it will give a low latency when working software-based synthesizers. What Midiman has done to cut the costs on this card is to provide nothing but the bare basics when it comes to features. It has two analog ins and outs a S/PDIF in/out and a MIDI interface with both in and out. That's it, and for someone like me who makes music alone and who don't own a lot of gear and instruments it works just fine. But if you have a large mixer and want to record several things at once for example a small band. This card won't do since it has too few in and outs.
As long as you stick to mostly using software and samples wich works great for electronic music this lack of connections will not be a problem.
Installation of the card is as simple as most PCI-cards. After turning of the power open up your comp, plug the card in a free PCI-slot, attach the S/PDIF & MIDI cable. And turn on your computer. You get the required drivers on CD-ROM. After installation you also get a software based Mixer & router where you can control the levels of audio and where to route the audio.
There is some bundled software as well. a sequenser from Delta Fruityloops express and a few others. These are all budget versions and as such they do not have all the functions of the full price stand alone software but they can still be used if you don't have anything else. They're ok for learning the basics of making computer-based music.
Nowadays all you really need for making great electronic music of all kinds is a good soundcard(such as this one) good software and perhaps a MIDI-keyboard(not required but it's easier and more fun if you have one). That's it. In fact many albums of techno and other forms of electronic music that you can buy in your store were created on laptop computers using only software.
If you're a gaming enthusiast I'd recommend a good soundblaster card over the Audiophile. Soundblasters have better functionality than the bare-bone audiophile in most other applications except music making.
Recently the market for this card has shrunk a bit since other music oriented soundcards have dropped in price. so if you add perhaps another 100$ you could get a card with more ins & outs and other features. If you're on a tight budget i'd still say this card is the best though.
If there's any info you miss in this review please post a comment and I'll try to answer your questions.
Cheers
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 250
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Epinions.com ID:
boffo
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Member: Peter Hjalmarsson
Location: Sweden
Reviews written: 40
Trusted by: 7 members
About Me:
How come I only get MH-ratings in categories where I am the only reviewer?
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