Audiophile USB to PCM

Edsilva - I found the Edirol UA-25 to be fairly good, but great after I modded it. I only used the Edirol in "advanced" mode to output 24/96, which uses a custom driver on the PC rather than the windows driver, which is terrible.

If the Waveterminal passes 44.1, then this would make sense. It must use a custom driver.

The driver makes the biggest difference in sound, but it is also important to bypass windows Kmixer with ASIO plug-in for Foobar2000. If you dont have ASIO plug-in for Foobar2000 just email me and I will send it to you. You can tell if you are going through Kmixer by bringing up the windows volume controls and see if any of the sliders affect the volume while you are playing music. If they do, then you are still going through Kmixer. You need ASIO.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer/modder
nugent@empiricalaudio.com

I double checked, I am using the ASIO with foobar... The waveterminal does not upsample, however.

Edsilva - have you had much trouble with pops and ticks with ASIO and Foobar?

Is it the ASIO .dll or ASIO4ALL?

Hmm... Neither ASIO.dll nor ASIO4ALL.dll shows up if I run a search on *.dll. Yet, the Waveterminal behaves like its ASIO, the "control panel" says "ASIO 2.0" on it prominently, and the website states: "MME & DirectSound Driver, ASIO 2.0, Direct KS for SONAR" under features. Is ASIO something they could have licensed and baked into the ESI24.dll driver?

Edesilva - I got a deal on a U24 a few months back. I'm running the V 2.61 driver. My control panel doesn't say ASIO 2.0, just an ASIO "logo" in the corner. Foobar recognizes my U24 as an ASIO capable output device. I believe the capability is inherint to the esiu24.dll. No ASIO dll in my system files either.

Would like to experiment with the upsampling and SRC however I am content with my 44.1 performance. I have experimented with the Convolver DSP plugin. I have acheived my absolute best sound utilizing ASIO ouput as well as this plugin. Specifically utilizing an impulse entitled "SPL GoldMike Impulse.wav" On some slightly "brighter" recordings I have had excellent results with a "neutral.wav" impulse. I believe I got these at a site called www.noisevault.com

I did try a friends DIY NonOS DAC with the U24 (less the Convolver plugin) and the sound was easily bested by the plugin utilizing the GoldMike impulse. The plugin does not increase CPU usage on my computer at all.

At any rate, Convolver is a great plugin in my camp - but be worth a little experimentation in yours as well. Have fun.