RME soundcard impresions

[Alaric]

Hi There,

For a while i've had a non-working RME hamerfall Digi 9636. I finaly found the solution to the problem when i bought an 8 Chanel output card for it and looked at the card to check its revision level and layout...I found a mac chip. £20 and a week later i had my PC chip and i installed it last night.

I fired the machine up after removing the creative audigy 2 zs card and driver and re-installed the RME with the right chip and for an encore, the 8 chanel analogue output, reboot and the RME card worked, i knew this because even the start-up jingle sounded different, as did the general windows sounds....I was most suprised as it was running on SPDIF and i wasn't expeceting much difference as SPDIF should be SPDIF, but there was. Brighter and more seperation between notes !

Switching to analogue and it certainly produces a nice sound, i had a quick fiddle with Winamp and an ASIO driver and with that and the milk drop visual plugin running, i forgot about actualy watching things (mid way through stargate atlantis S1) and carried on listening to music. One track even the wife commented on "Oh i always thought she was singing about pictures....track is called Pink Chairs" so i'd say thats a sucess.

I need more cables to get a surround set-up going on the analogue outputs, but stereo is back in fashion in my cinema for the moment.

cya,
Lee

[DeeeKaaY]

Hooray for RME! For music, stereo is still the best and these high quality cards are fantastic when it comes to hifi per pound/euro/dollar. Well done on the repair job and enjoy your listening mate :-) DK
PS Mark Grant can sort you out some good calbes for the RME, he produced some great results for me.

[Alaric]

Hi There,

I have a MG digital cable which i got a while back as i couldn't get optical to work and the card didn't have the break out cable. It didn't work at the time, but does now, so i'm using that for SPDIF.

Analogue connections are 1/4" stereo jacks to dual phono's. I've picked some OK cables off ebay for a tempory lash up and will have words with Mark when i figure out quite what is going to end up where....I guess i'll have to use the 5.1 analogue bypass on my amp (normaly SACD) with a pair of cables split for the 7.1 back chanesl or something....shame my Yammy doesn't have a 7.1bypass (i don't think anything does ??)

Thanks,
Lee