Posted by Ed Form [ 217.155.197.188 ] on April 30, 2008 at 18:09:03:

In Reply to: Soundcard worries posted by Ed Form on February 03, 2008 at 06:47:38:

Just a follow up to let you know the solution to this problem with my soundcard [E-Mu 1616M].

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had found a possible solution in a couple of measurement software systems that run under the ASIO driver regime and I had partially decided to go with one of them, but a little slice of fate stepped in when something irrepairable went wrong with the beta of Internet Explorer 8 I rather stupidly decided to try on the laptop I use to run measurement software. This left me with no real choice but to reload the laptop from scratch and, I accidentally loaded the last but one versions of the soundcard drivers and mixer program, rather than the very latest versions that I used when I initially set the system up. You can imagine my suprise - and delight - when I discovered that these programs allow the soundcard to behave absolutely impeccably under the WAVE system: up to and including operation at 192KHz/24Bit with one of the measurement software suites.

To check out the situation a little further I updated both drivers and mixer program to the latest versions and was immediately back to grotesque-sounding tonebursts instead of clean sinewaves from the generator modules of all of the trial measurement software to hand. I reloaded the correct versions of the drivers and mixer software and the system reverted to perfect behaviour!!!

This breakthrough has allowed me to choose my preferred measurement software - Spectra Plus - which, as well as permitting operation at 192KHz/24Bit, seems to be the best suited to my particular field of study at the moment. I can't get over the ability to produce spectra with a clean, stable noise floor at -120dB. Back in my days in the loudspeaker industry, $60,000 dollars could not have bought equipment with that sort of performance.

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