M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

...remember these are unbalanced inputs & outputs on the analog side. Additionally, setting this card to 24 bit recording and setting Audacity to 24 bit recording only gets 16 bit recordings.

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

- I am using the product for multitrack recording with various software depending on my needs.
- It is straight forward enough that even though I am electrical engineer, you don't have to be one to get up an running.
- I could have/maybe should have bought the PCI express product as the standard PCI is getting hard to come by. However, you can always find a pc out there that supports standard PCI an still get wonderful performance at a lessor pc cost.

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

I have a large collection of LP's from back in the day. I have been wanting to do two things. Create an analog stereo suite like I had in my younger years and convert my albums to digital. The 2496 is a great card to accomplish the conversion part. It gives me the analog outs and ins I need and the quality of the card is amazing. I have a copy of Audition 3 and I am able to make analog copies of the albums that to me sound better that the digital ones you find online. It is kind of like film and digital photography. They both have their own feel to them. We are far enough along in the digital age that finding analog inputs is getting difficult to find. Thanks for keeping this amazing card alive!
I did not have any trouble installing the card. I downloaded XP drivers from the site and it was done. I have built a computer just for this conversion process and I am running XP SP3.

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

The M-Audio 2496 card is an excellent sound card for under $100.00.. First of all please do your research before buying this card. I bought this card for my G5 dual 2.0, installed the card, and M-Powered Protools and all the drivers that came with the card. I played some tracks in Protools, and I got all of these weird audio artifacts, and errors saying to change my HW settings in Protools, really on just two tracks, I reformatted my hard drive, installed new drivers from the website, same results. I then went back to B&H thinking the soundcard was faulty, got the new card same results…Then I discover that all M-Audio Pci Delta Series cards don't work on all Single or Dual, only G5 machines that have 8 slots of ram work. So I have no choice but to use the card in a G4 dual 1.25 which works great, but not the power of the G5. I don't know all the verbiage about the problems using this M-Audio 2496, but I have included a link to confirm what I discovered tying to use this card on my Mac G5 PPC.Wes SmithProducer [@]

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

I use this card to capture/digitize live audio from an analog mixer. I also use this card to monitor/mix/play stone cold jams. It is a vast improvement from the stock sound card that was previously in my G5. It's not going to make bad equipment sound good; it's not a miracle worker you know. Do not expect this card to solve all of your problems. When used under the right circumstances amazing audio can be created and played back with this card. Yes, the booklet and drivers that accompany the card are outdated, but one can easily download the relevant driver from M-Audio's website. Installation was fairly simple, you'll just need to dedicate some time to getting to know the card and syncing it up with everything. There are a few downsides to this card: consider the inputs and outputs. This may sound obvious, but you're going to have a hard time plugging headphones into the RCA outputs (unless you simply buy some fancy adapters). This shouldn't be a problem if you know what you need, as you should. The only thing that has negatively affected my judgement of this card is that it, or the driver I installed seems to have weakened my G5's normally spot on consistency. It's frozen unexpectedly during start-up twice since the installation. I do not know what caused this; it may be a coincidence, but it'd be a pretty eerie coincidence. It hasn't happened since and I've been using it for weeks, so I'm hoping that it was just a fluke.

To summarize: this card sounds really amazing. You'll need to put some time into getting it set up, but you want it to WORK, right!? Also, it may or may not crash your G5 twice.

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

recording quality from this card is not great. its an old card (bought mine in 2004/5) doesnt have a dedicated A/D converter, only a CS8427 transceiver. my creative gaming card has a dedicated wolfson A/D converter and the sound was definitely superior. cudos to m-audio for drives. they had XP x64 beta drivers when XPx64 was still beta. strangely its a pain to download them now reqring some login

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

Installed in Win 7 64 bit system. Easy to install and use. I now have these cards in two machines.
Best sound card I have ever had.

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

This is a pretty straight forward card that's been around awhile. I purchased this card to replace one of the 1st generation Creative Audigy Platinum series cards. The Audigy card had some great interfacing ports that were very convenient for the user including light pipe, all from the front of the pc, the 2496 doesn't support light pipe and offers a "breakout cable" from the back of the box. I was willing to forgo the light pipe option as I haven't used it that much. Neither card supports xlr, however the Audigy supports 1/4" for guitar/keyboard. The Audigy has a standard headphone out, 2496 no headphone out at all! The 2496 has the separate cable ins and outs, two in two out.
The Audigy served me well through the years but was emiting too much noise through my audio monitors,that noise never translated to the finished product but becomes quite annoying after listening for a while, thus the search for a new card.
Audigy has a digital option for compact disc the Audiophile 2496 does not. Upon firing up the Audiophile to record through Adobe Audition 3, I noticed the same amount of floor noise as the Audigy, something I was looking to improve upon, ...I haven't burned a cd or dvd yet through the 2496, but don't really expect issues. Documentation is poor in the sense it needs to be updated, at least through the home website. Some of the examples provided in the material seem to have dissapeared i.e. internal patching. The most recent driver update listed on the web page must not be meant for the 2496, even though it came up specifically for the 2496, as when I execute the update the file won't update from the current one to the new one. Even though I've followed directions and downloaded the correct file. (you can't really download the wrong file following the web site directions ) My suspicion is this card has been around long enough to prove itself
"for what it is" and support for it "maybe" on the wayside as new products emerge from this manufacture. It only supports multichannel sound through the spdif option, which was a bit of a disappointment. I have yet to game with this card but expect it to perform ok (not much of a gamer but the surround sound hook up in a more typical way would really help. The older Audigy easily supports 5.1 with no special hookups newer Audigy cards support 7.1)
The real reason for purchasing this card was for quieter "feedback" through audio recording and editing. Recording in the sense of if I have a project already in the box and have a musician come in for a quick overdub, that's the only time I'd use this option with this card as I have a dedicated recording unit. I've already mentioned the floor noise, again the Audigy had a convenient way to bring in the guitar/bass from the front of the unit, the 2496 has to patch into a patch bay, another expense if you don't have one. The 2496 has NO FIRE WIRE, Audigy had internal fire wire, firewire port in back of machine (via pci card) and firewire port in front of machine,very convenient and this is an option I use all the time. the 2496 has a higher sample rate capability then the Audigy, but then nothing wrong with 48hz in the Audigy. One nice feature of the 2496 is you can "stack" them, providing you have the room on your mother board. Unless you are using quality audio monitors stick with the newer Audigy, or if you, like me, are replacing the Audigy, steer away from this unit and look to something higher. While I haven't fully experienced this card, I'm not completely dissapointed. It's providing quieter audio playback, however I will be replacing the 2496 in the near future.

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

Easy to install, do not use the install cd. download the last updated drive at the manufacturer's website. This sounds very good and very clear. Now I can use Pro Tools M-Powered!

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

This card was easy to install. After plugging it in and installing the driver, it worked right away on Windows Vista. It also worked immediately on Ubuntu Linux without any configuration.

The only thing to keep in mind is that there are no connectors or preamps for 1/4 inputs or 3.5mm output. This card was designed to be plugged into a mixing board or a preamp for your inputs and studio monitors for the output. If you've got that, excellent. If you don't, you'll be spending more money to get this setup to work or you'll need to go for a different M-Audio card with an interface.

Comments about M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI Digital Recording Interface:

It is amazing cost/benefit, works great!