On 07/03/11 13:59, Josh Lawrence wrote:
hey everyone, my friend and I are starting a recording project that will require multiple mic inputs. my soundcard has only two xlr inputs, and I need at least 8. I could buy a cheap mixer and and sum everything up, but I'd like to have access to all of the channels in ardour if possible. does anyone have any recommendations for "pro-sumer" soundcards that have at minimum 8 xlr inputs?
I'm very happy with my Focusrite Saffire PRO40 -- it's a Firewire interface with 8 analogue ins and 10 analogue outs. Each of those inputs is an XLR/jack combo, and each has a preamp with phantom power, so hooking up eight mics is a no-brainer. The first two inputs can also be switched to a high-impedance mode for plugging in guitars directly. If you need more ports later, it has an ADAT port that you can hook one of those Behringer units up to.
Performance on it is great -- I'm not the best judge, but the preamps sound very clean and noise-free to me. On a realtime kernel I can run it with 4ms latency in JACK with no problems, but I prefer to run it at 8ms on a stock kernel instead.
To get it working under Linux, you need FFADO SVN (Ubuntu Maverick actually ships with a recent enough SVN version for it to work, and I think Debian Squeeze might, too), and you need to use the old Firewire stack; FFADO does work with the new stack, but there's a bug in there somewhere that causes audio output to fail on DICE-based devices like the PRO40 when using FFADO on the new stack.
You'll also need a Firewire controller if you don't have one; I was lucky enough to have a TI-chipset controller on my motherboard, but it hopefully won't be hard to track down a PCI card with a TI chipset.
Thanks Leigh _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
