Having worked with hardware multitrackers through the years, open-reel through to hard drive models, I decided to drag myself into the 21st century and record on the PC. I did all my research on the web and found that the Audiophile 2496 seemed to fit the bill. Not really much to describe physically, it's a PCI soundcard, and if you've ever installed a PCI card it's a no brainer. The disk of drivers that came with it were well out of date but the latest drivers are easily available from M Audio's web site. I got the latest versions and here's where it went a bit wrong. In Ableton Live Lite, and other recording programs, it would not record higher than 22050Khz using ASIO. After a trawl through the M-Audio sites forum it turned out that for Windows XP (SP2 or SP3) the previous driver version was the better one to use. With that sorted everything was fine. Everything works with almost zero latency and the audio from the card is at least equal to my previous hardware recordings. Sounds from the sound chip on the card (the ones you get by default if you play an SMF in WinAMP or similar) are not anything special but I don't think that's really the kind of thing a card like this is intended for. If you're on a restricted budget and can live with only two inputs/outputs plus SPDIF and one each MIDI in and out then I'd highly recommend this card. For the price you're not going to get much better. A bonus is the fact that the box states that you get Ableton Live Lite v4 when you actually get v6 and when you register the v6 you get a FREE upgrade to Live Lite 8. I call that a bit of a bargain and I think I made a good choice. Recommended.
(I gave this 4 stars because 5 stars is perfect and nothing in music is ever perfect is it?).
