I’ve been looking at the frontier designs Dakota card which as 2 adat inputs and 2 adat outputs as well as S/PDIF and some midi.
the Terratec EWS88D also has adat ins/outs with S/PDIF and some midi.
Obviously the Terratec has only one set of adat, but for $150, I could buy two and have the same as the Dakota.
Anyways, I’m wondering what people think about the drivers.
Terratec claims that their card outputs 24-bit audio as the 32-bit floating point automatically, thereby
"Regarding the 32 bits in the formula (rather than 24 bits): All of the cards drivers are capable of forwarding 24-bit audio data to the recording software as 32-bit data.
This feature reduces the CPU load substantially, as 24-bit data doesn’t need to be “stacked” to pass through the 32-bit wide bus, as in the conventional “packed-byte” process"
while frontier has the
"Q5: What is “bus-mastering, scatter-gather, zero wait state, PCI DMA,” and why should I care?
That entire nerdy phrase is about efficiency, and Dakota is the best. The less time your CPU spends doing boring audio transfers on the PCI bus, the more time it has to pull tracks off disk, to run DSP plug-ins, and to respond to your commands. We’ve designed Dakota to be the most efficient soundcard possible so that you can do as much audio work as possible with your computer"
I’d like to get the frontier designs card most, but am curious how well the two cards compare in performance ignoring the more ins/outs on the dakota.
please tell me soon, because I only have a short time to decide.