I've found a laptop i want to buy

Its a Centrino 1.6

My friend tells me I will need to buy an ASIO sound card so that latency won't be problem for me. Can someone explain the problem and tell me what i have to do and how to do it?

Cheers

I'll be running cubase and reason...

ASIO is pertaining to the software driver of the soundcard, consider doing a search on this and the old forum as this subject has been done to death, are you looking at firewire or usb? whats your budget??

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as metal as your nanna`s new hip

Your best bet for a laptop soundcard is an Echo Indigo, all for less than £100. All you need is a Cardbus slot in your laptop and you're away. I've been using one with Cubase and Live for a while now and have never had a single problem.

Yea the Echo Indigo IO is superb, and is so small and portable... The sound quality is marvelous too.

I, too, have an Indigo IO card and love it. Question for the experienced...what have you found to be the best way to record vocals using the Indigo IO card? I originally bought the card due to it's small size and portability for the field, but am wondering if, in order to record vocals to disk, I'll need to get a preamp. I still have 5 more days until I can return/exchange for another interface, i.e. the Edirol FA101.

Any opinions/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

bump

Hi,

You will need a preamp or channel strip to amplify a microphone signal to line level in order to input it into the Indigo card. You may also need such a device to provide phantom power too.

Personally I went for an M Audio Firewire 410, as I use it for live performance and didn't want to have mini jack connectors. I am also finding the 8 outputs very useful and have used the built-in preamps on occasion. The two (non-independant) headphone amplifiers are great for pre-listening in Live whilst also sending a click to the drummer. It is nice not to have to use a seperate MIDI interface as well and I find I have less issues with MIDI on the 410 than when using my USB MIDI interface.

Matt

I think the Firewire 410 is cool too. But bear in mind you can get horrible earthing noises in laptops through the outputs. There are various fixes for these things, many on this forum, so bear that in mind!

I have to indigo IO too on my laptop but I am not fully satisfied, it happens far too often that my windows XP doesn't boot, if I take the card out before booting it works fine, but this is annoying to do each time, and I am afraid it may even harm the cardslot and the card by (dis)connecting it so much...
Apart from that I sometimes have ASIO warnings when running Logic. This will depend on each systems specs, but I needed to mention it anyway. since the buy, almost a year, there are no driver updates either. But then, it may be the cause of my laptop.

Never heard about it, and I know lots of Indigo users, this must be something else I suppose but install the new driver, perhaps it will get better. M audio does not give such good latency and they always have driver problems, I dumped it. I theory I loved it but in practice it wasnt as good as Indigo. If I , anyone, have spare cash best is to get RME.

Quote Tontje:

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I have to indigo IO too on my laptop but I am not fully satisfied, it happens far too often that my windows XP doesn't boot, if I take the card out before booting it works fine, but this is annoying to do each time, and I am afraid it may even harm the cardslot and the card by (dis)connecting it so much...
Apart from that I sometimes have ASIO warnings when running Logic. This will depend on each systems specs, but I needed to mention it anyway. since the buy, almost a year, there are no driver updates either. But then, it may be the cause of my laptop.

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I run Logic and an Indigo card on my laptop; I've no issues to report. The sound quality is excellent (and certainly fabulous for the price), though perhaps not as objectively "marvelous" as OOZ so enthusiastically proclaimed

I also own a Digigram VXPocket440 (4 x I/Os). Its audio quality is far superior to the Indigo's (with a price tag to match). Unlike the Indigo, it has no protuberance, but rather, a moderately heavy breakout cable (with XLR, S/PDIF, and LTC connectors) that you plug in to the card. The VXPocket440 also allows for Line/Mic level switching, so you don't need a pre-amp (unless you require that sound, and/or phantom power).

To the best of my knowledge, though its price is significantly higher than the Indigo's, the VXPocket440 offers the best quality (most neutral) pcmcia interface audio. If anyone knows otherwise, I'm interested, so please let me know

well, the Echo Indigo IO may be a great audio card ( I have had the original Echo indigo in the past, and it's awsome !!)

But BEWARE of the incopatibilleties between the ENE CB 1410 PCICMA adapter (cardbus II slot) and the Echo cards !!

It seems a lot of the NEW laptops have the ENE CB 1410 cardbus adaptor installed.

My old laptop are able to run the Echo cards just fine, but my NEW Laptop is having a very hard time...

I am waiting for a fix\ resolve on this...but you should be on high alert !

FYI to those who have problems with ENE CB1410 Cardbus Controller:
Echo Audio has developed a solution, they have devised a "filter driver" for the ENE cb1410 that makes it work, at least on my HP ZT3232 laptop, with the Indigo I/O.

Here is a link to the driver if anyone wants to try it:
http://www.echoaudio.com/downloadfiles/Other/EchoEneUtil.exe

Otherwise, new driver for the Indigo series (v6.11) has just been released as well (with GSIF-2 support).

Right now there's a Digigram VX2 on ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=3750921880&ssPag eName=STRK:MESE:IT

These are very good cards and has been said, much better quality that the echo indigo.

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need to get rid of this stupid sig...

RME

How's the drivers for the Digigram VX2 ??

There's a SOS review from 2000 on these pages...
4 years old and then some...

I have a RME multiface card on my second laptop. The soundquality is not better than the Echo Indigo (at least I am not able to hear ANY difference), but you have got more ins and outs on the RME as well as digital connections.
But then again, the multiface is not that portable...

If you are a Sonar user, the Echo Indigo drivers are better than the RME Multifcae drivers. (in terms of latency, on the same machine I get the RME drivers to run at 5 ms minimum, while the Echo card runs at 1.5 ms minimum )

d

Are there 24/96 Digigrams ?

Quote:

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FAQs: VXpocket 440

Which audio formats does VXpocket 440 support?

PCM 8, 16 and 24 bit at sampling frequencies 8, 11.025, 16, 22.05, 32, 44.1 and 48 kHz are supported. 24bit samples are supported by the Wave, the CoreAudio and the ASIO drivers but not by the DirectSound and the SoundManager drivers, of wich specifications are limited to 16bit by Microsoft and Apple respectively.

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http://www.digigram.com/faqs/getinfo.htm?prod_key=11500