[LAU] RME Digi96/8 PAD pci pro

[Giso Grimm]

Paul Davis wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Grammostola Rosea
> <rosea.grammostola at gmail.com <mailto:rosea.grammostola at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi,
> 
>     What do you guys think of the RME Digi96/8 PAD pci pro? How is the card
>     compared to an maudio delta 66  for example?
> 
> 
> personally speaking, i would avoid this card. even though the RME
> products that came after this are, in my opinion, peerless, this one
> came before RME really understood how to do PCI bus-mastering. as a
> result it is an inefficient h/w design that requires the device driver
> to do a bunch of work that in the digi9652 and everything that followed
> was done by the hardware. i am sure that the sound quality is good,
> probably even a little better than the m-audio but certainly comparable
> - its just not up the same internal design specs as RME's later products.

And what is actually even more visible to the user are the strange
buffer size constraints: Only the whole memory can be used, thus
nperiods*fragmentsize*samplesize is fixed. Each of those parameters has
only few possible values. For typical settings (32Bit/sample and ADAT
mode) this results in fragment sizes of either 64 or 256 samples (thanks
to the jack developers now at least nperiods can be decreased to values
below the hardware nperiods, though). Synchronizing and hardware routing
is much less flexible than with later RME products.

Personally I would avoid that card (I bought an RME Digi96/8 a few years
ago, everything said here holds for the whole Digi96/8 series).

Giso