First impression's of the new EMU card

This Usenet post by Viljem Krizman tells the story of the second card so far to be built around the EMU 10K1 chip as used in the SB Live!

I( have not altered this post in anyway apart from formatting it for better legibilty)

In past days, I was looking to see any posts about EMU Aps card, but seems to me it was in vain.  Yesterday I've finally received my APS card and so I've decided to write first impressions.

Neatly packed E-card and E-drive, a few cables, two CDs and a single booklet. Don't expect to see gold-plated connectors - they are not. I've carefully read the install information and plugged the card in my computer (motherboard VS400FX, Pentium Pro 200Mhz, ATI 3d Charger, 64 Mb Ram, Awe32-legacy, IDE disk, IDE-CD-ROM and IDE-ZIP drive, Windows 95 - not OSR/2). That was easy. Than I've hoped that everything would work and it did. Than I've installed the drivers and additional software. (The card uses IRQ 11), rebooted my computer and started listening to the new card.

After installing Emu mixer and Soundfont loader there were no problems, but when I've installed the Soundfont manager for Cakewalk some problems occurred. CW 6.01 was no longer been able to load SoundFonts. There were constant soundfont load errors, a few CW chrashes, and an EMU mixer crash. I've also noticed card stop playing at all, but after playing a Wav file everything went normal. I've manually removed the Soundfont router and completely reinstalled the software.

From that point on I've had no problem anymore (except CW 6.01). One of CDs contains CW 6.02 express. I've installed that and SF router worked fine. In manual installation I've noticed that SF router requires version CW 6.02 or later, so maybe this is the reason for all crashes.

Ok, what's on the CDs. The fist CD is from Emu. It contains drivers, mixer, SF loader and router. Than there is Vienna version 2.2. Before I've reinstalled the drivers I've had no audition function, but after that all worked flawlessly (I can work with Awe and Aps at the same time). There is no additional functionality included in this version. As a mater of fact, it's quite the same software as it was Vienna 2.1, only APS support is added. Also included on CD is Sound Forge XP, and a midi player which is able to load soundfonts, and some extensions to use with CW- a new StudioWare Panel (there are added four new controllers mapped from 21-24 which will be used to somehow enhance the SoundFonts 2.1 - but for now there are only SoundFonts 2.01).

Included on this CD are also about 350Mb of SoundFonts. Mostly they are from Emu Modul Mania and Emu Multimedia collection and from EMU Developers Choice (small size) CDs. There are also some new banks converted from E4 library. Overall they are good, some of them are excellent, but this is another story.

The second CD contains only CakeWalk Express 6.02

Then I've begun with testing. Both S/PDIF in worked OK. So far I've only tested them with AWE S/PDIF output. For testing outputs I've used external DAC (DDE 1.0 from Audio Alchemy) and both worked fine. So far I was not able to copy files from digital out to digital in, I will try this later. Well, for S/PDIFs out it seems that they share the same limitation as with Live! - only 48Khz sampling rate.

All analog lines also work fine, but I was disappointed with microphone preamp. I have an old Shure dynamic mic (SM558SA) and when I've turn on the mic preamp gain there was too much noise to be usable. Maybe impedance doesn't match or maybe it's just my mic. I will try this again with another mic. As for S/N ratio (I have yet to perform extensive tests) is about 90-93db. Also MIDI in and MIDI out work ok with no noticeable latency at all.

Some words on functionality. The mixer is really great (rather slow on screen refreshing, but this is due to all fancy shading outlook). There are 4 effect busses that can be used for effect routing and all inputs and outputs can also have inserts. You can also create 5 MIDI
submixes. Almost everything is reroutable to anything. The only things I miss so far are more wave devices.

The effects are another story. They are great too, especially shelf and parametric EQ (for the first time I was able to get the piano sound I like). Effects are fully tweakable, so you can adjust almost anything you want. Maybe it would be nice to have some additional effects, like rotatory speaker emulation.

One of the greatest disappointments was the MIDI implementation. At first glance it seems that it is equal to the implementation of the AWE. I've really expected to see the power of the new chip, but for now I just have to wait (I hope). There are however 4 new controllers added, but for now with no support.

On the other hand: documentation sucks. I miss a lot of information about the card. There are no S/PDIF specifications, nothing about ADC/DAC, nothing about impedance - nothing. And of course no 3d sound and no EAX. However the APS can also handle CD digital input (there is 44.1Khz question about rate conversion) and Future Expansion connector which will be used for who now what.

I still have to do some hardware inspection to see if I can resolve some questions (E-card is connected with E-drive with strip cable, so one would expect the AD is done on the E-Drive, on the other hand headphone connector on E-drive is connected with audio cable to the card) and some software tweaking. Oh, yes I have no glitches or any cranking noise with all video activity.

Overall it is a good card meant for musicians and for 570$ (that's what I've paid for purchase, mailing and all import taxes) I'm satisfied (for now).

Best regards, Vili

Viljem's post gives SB Live! users a glimpse of the near future

I was very interested in reading this post as it gives us SB Live! owners a chance to guage what may lie ahead for our own soundcard.  The Studioware Panel would certainly come in handy for Live Users and the inclusion of 4 new MIDI controllers and a different set of effects also bodes well for future updates.   The most interesting addition to the functionality is the manner in which effects and signals can be routed all over the place internally.  This is something I expected the SB Live to be able to do and was disappointed when it didn't.

Vienna 2.2 adds no functionality over 2.1 and I fully expect 2.3 to be the same for the Live!.

All very interesting.  I might have to scrounge a set of EMU drivers and apps and see if they won't work straight off with the Live!. ... anyone game?