Soundcards: Delta 1010 or Echo 3G?

1

rubs his belly, the old soundcard has been eaten

Murrrr, delightful. ^^

I need a new soundcard now. Am I right in assuming that we still don’t have any kind of external soundcard support? (USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt)

I would prefer to use native drivers unless the opensound drivers offer multi-channel recording and playback, low latency, and all the usual native-like features (any information?)

From my search it looks as if there are three interesting cards that meet my requirements:

  • M-Audio Delta 1010
  • Echo Gina 3G
  • Echo Layla 3G

Has anyone got any recent experience with any of these under Haiku? Preferably recent experience.

The essential features are:

  • Completely gliltch-free playback
  • Completely glitch-free analogue recording
  • Ability to switch the sample rate between 44100Hz or 48000Hz as required. I don’t mind rebooting between switches. The actual sample clock on the card must be changed, not some kind of cheap resampling trick.

Further nearly-essential features are:

  • Ability to synchronize to an external clock (one of: S/PDIF, ADAT, Wordclock input)
  • Fully working S/PDIF digital output and input
  • Fully working ADAT digital output and input (not applicable to the Delta 1010)
  • The capability for multi-channel playback (ideally the outputs should be mapped to the front/rear/centre/etc. outputs of the media kit’s mixer so different apps can be sent to different outputs)
  • The capability for multi-channel recording (via analogue, and via ADAT except the Delta 1010)

It looks like I’ll have to write/modify some software for multi-channel recording (Haiku’s SoundRecorder?) so as long as it exposes a multi-channel media kit node I’m happy.

I think the Delta 1010 may be supported in opensound as well as natively. Would I be able to get the above list of features going through opensound in case the native drivers aren’t cutting it?

I’m trying to find actual usage reports to find out exactly what state the drivers are in. The Haiku hardware database isn’t helping me with this. Didn’t one of the Haiku developers years ago have an Echo card to assist with driver development?

2

If you get an answer, you can ether put it in here, https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/HardwareInfo

or write it in here and I will update the pages.

//Fredrik

3

I have also hade a look at the source of echo and updated the driver information.

https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/echo

The source are based on a the 2002 drivers that was used both for Windows an MacOS

and yes no external support.

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ModeenF - when I decide on a card, I’ll make sure to submit a detailed compatibility report.
It looks like I might be on my own concerning actually trying this?

The source for the Echo drivers looks a lot more complete than the ICE (Delta 1010) drivers, but that might just be because it has to support more cards. I would hope being based on the main driver code released by Echo, there should be less little issues and glitches than a from-scratch driver?

Oddly support in Linux is the opposite story, the beard-infested guys seem to recommend the Delta 1010, and there is no out-of-the-box compatibility at all for the Echo cards, you have to compile the driver yourself! Unbelievable, considering Echo even went to the trouble to release their source under the LGPL…

Still, the Echo Gina and Layla cards appear to be quite a lot better than the rusty old Delta 1010, this is quite fitting for Haiku.

One thing I do wonder about is how Thunderbolt devices appear to the system. Apparently the interface just carries a few lanes of PCI Express traffic and is mostly system-transparent. I wonder how system transparent, is there any hot-swap plug-and-play stuff going on? If not, Thunderbolt soundcards might be the first modern soundcards to be supportable (with a simple driver) in Haiku, maybe even already via opensound if they use a common PCI/PCIe sound chip bridged to Thunderbolt.

This is highly relevant because it looks like the entire pro soundcard industry will move that direction in the next couple of months. No doubt the PCI and PCIe slots will disappear without a trace shortly thereafter, especially once the GPU becomes socketed or integrated on the CPU in some fashion.

In any case it is moot right now, if the Echo driver works well. Amazingly, the Echo cards are still on the market, I can actually go out and buy a piece of hardware that might be fully supported in Haiku! Quite why they’re on the market I’ve no idea. I’ve not heard of anyone using PCI soundcards in pro audio for at least 10 years, and the deceived consumers who believe they’re missing out on some kind of “high definition” sound buy PCIe or USB soundcards now.

Lucky I still have some PCI slots. My next PC definitely won’t, god knows what I’ll do then. Maybe I will get good results out of a USB-to-parallel converter with a Disney Sound Source plugged into it. Better mod the Disney Sound Source to give it a balanced XLR output, it has to meet quite stringent professional standards.

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Drivers for Echo’s cards are in mainline Linux for some time, and suitable firmware is shipped in major Linux distributions.

[quote]
One thing I do wonder about is how Thunderbolt devices appear to the system. Apparently the interface just carries a few lanes of PCI Express traffic and is mostly system-transparent. I wonder how system transparent, is there any hot-swap plug-and-play stuff going on? If not, Thunderbolt soundcards might be the first modern soundcards to be supportable (with a simple driver) in Haiku, maybe even already via opensound if they use a common PCI/PCIe sound chip bridged to Thunderbolt.[/quote]

They are indeed PCIe devices, and yes they’re hotpluggable. Obviously that can’t work in Haiku as it stands. In principle cold-plug (ie make sure it’s plugged in before booting Haiku) could work, but many Thunderbolt implementatons today require ACPI acrobatics and a good PCI implementation even in this scenario so there’s probably work to be done just to get that far.

Most of the audio vendors who’ve shown interest in Thunderbolt at this point wanted the bandwidth e.g. Universal Audio and those are anything but a “common PCI/PCIe sound chip”. The integrated electronics in Thunderbolt cables means they’ll never be comparably cheap to USB, Ethernet or even Firewire, so there’s no pressure to churn out a cheap solution using an off-the-shelf PCI audio chip. Anyone who is price sensitive would buy USB today and will still be doing that if/when Thunderbolt is widespread.

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ASoftwareHatingFurry : Have you tested the mailing list or IRC? I beleve there was some talk about souncards now and then and MIDI.