Main PC Update

September 16, 2011

I finally decided to upgrade the sound card in my main PC (located in my study, see here for details). Once I decided to do this, I went ahead and installed two 4 GB sticks of RAM for my soon-to-happen upgrade to Windows 7 Pro, 64 bit. After a little thought, I also decided to try a Solid State Hard Drive (SSD).

I went with an E-MU 1212M PCIe pro card. This is one of the cheapest high quality sound cards out there with both a high quality ADC and high quality analog outputs. Signal to noise ratio of the stereo analog outputs is 120 dB. It can also operate the 1616m dock I use for speaker testing if I ever need 6 analog outputs. As it is sold, it comes with a daughter card offering a 2 channel balanced/unbalanced analog output.

The main reason I tried it is its ASIO driver. I really wanted to see what MC 16 sounded like with a native ASIO driver, really leaving Windows XP out of the processing chain. I wasn't disappointed, it sounds great and is as quiet as its advertised specs promise.

I also like the way their driver software operates. You build input strips in the mixer like you would in a pro mixer. If you add a stereo input strip for ASIO channels 1 and 2, you get J. River's MC 16 output on that strip. Add another stereo strip for Wave channels 1 and 2, and you have the standard Windows sounds there, including (for me anyway) Beyond TV's audio output.