the Aardvark Q10: are the reveiws true?

[Katrina]

well, are they?

oh...and what about Cakewalk 9?

[Randall]

cakewalk 9 is ok,thy throw it into everybodys hrdware package because they cant sell it anymore and they will pester you to upgrade to sonar,the Q-10 is alright from what I hear but personally I would go with these http://www.esi-pro.com/viewProduct.php?pid=8&page=1

[apropos of nothing]

Maxio costs twice as much as the Q10.

I've got an Aardvark DirectPro 24/96 which is the same PCI card with a different breakout box.

The sound is real good. Not so good as I wouldn't like a nice pre-amp, but certainly very reasonable.

The drivers are... Not so good. They'll likely be fine if you have a simple set-up (Aardvark is the only PCI card, say an AGP vid card and no RAID or NIC) on an intel chipset or AMD or NForce2 chipset. Other chipsets, other options, you're likely to run into driver conflicts.

I like mine. I have to argue with it once in awhile, but its very nice for the cost and I've made some excellent recordings with it. I run at about 7ms latency. I've mixed things with 40 channels of digital audio and software synthesis, and that's on an AMD XP 1600+ chip. I imagine more recent processors would give even more outrageous track-counts.

Outlook: guardedly optimistic.

[Randall]

twice the price? not quite but the quality of the pre's and converters make this a red hot freaking product in my book,1 card for 32 I/O at 192K EEEEEEhooolaaeeechigooowwww,of course you would never use it this way but still and the EWDM or ASIO drivers are killer,the virtual patchbay rocks and this puppy is stable on PC or Mac,,these guys got it going on,as soon and I mean AS SOON as it's available I'll have 2 of them in my rack for analog tranfers

[wenzel.hellgren]

the Q10 sounds good, but does have bad drivers. I installed the thing on 4 different PC's and it only worked on one of them. I would not reccomend anything made by Ego-sys (the makers of the other insterface mentioned in this thread), their drivers are just as bad.

I used Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 for years, it's a pretty easy to use program but does not perform that well. I prefer Logic these days. Neither Aardvark or Ego-sys interfaces work very well with Logic. This is because Logic uses ASIO drivers, Cakewalk uses WDM/MME drivers.

[AGCurry]

I don't really know what the reviews say, but I have used the Q10 for about a year and a half. It's a good product; good preamps and converters. I generally don't bother with separate mic preamps, so my setup is simple, just the way I like it. Recently I added the 24/96 to my PC DAW, and the two do work well together, and I can record twelve tracks at once.

I did have trouble installing it, but I was putting together the computer at the same time, so I don't know how much of my problem was the Aardvark software and how much was problems with configuring the PC. The Aardvark units - and drivers - are at least as stable as the rest of my PC, which freezes sometimes no matter what program I'm using. I'm using Win 98 SE.

And the Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 is fine for me as well. I've used Cakewalk since V7. Bought Sonar but didn't see that it did anything for ME over PA9.

[Randall]

I would not reccomend anything made by Ego-sys (the makers of the other insterface mentioned in this thread), their drivers are just as bad,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, sounds to me like you dont know how or cant get a stable system up and running on anything, the egosys drivers are solid here and a couple other guys I know who are using Wamiracks and I'm running a 600 mhz P3 at the moment,,,guys that make wiseass coments like this always kill me,sounds like something that maybe a pro-fools user told you and you want to spread the disease

[wenzel.hellgren]

"
I would not reccomend anything made by Ego-sys (the makers of the other insterface mentioned in this thread), their drivers are just as bad,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, sounds to me like you dont know how or cant get a stable system up and running on anything, the egosys drivers are solid here and a couple other guys I know who are using Wamiracks and I'm running a 600 mhz P3 at the moment,,,guys that make wiseass coments like this always kill me,sounds like something that maybe a pro-fools user told you and you want to spread the disease"


Sorry, it looks more like you have no idea what you are talking about. I install, trouble shoot, support, configure, and use DAW's for a living. I work in the support and testing department of a major DAW software/hardware manufacturer. I am not making a "wiseass comment", I am speaking from experience. I configure and trouble shoot 30-50 computers and audio/midi interfaces a day, and have been doing this for over three years.

The Wamirack is a POS, as is the Aardvark gear when it comes to performance and stability. While the Wami drivers may be stable, they are certainly not the best performers for low latency real time multi track audio.

So you have an ancient interface working on an ancient computer, what are you running, Windows 98? The Wami worked Ok in 98, but it realy is nothing to write home about performance wise. I haven't messed with it in XP, one reason being that in the 200-300 people I talk to a week for help with their DAW, perhaps 1 person every 9 months is using an Ego-sys interface. There must be a reason for this, right? I don't know of any professional studio of hand that uses aardvark or Ego-sys gear.

So basically what I get from your message is that if I don't have anything good to say about the interface, I should say nothing at all? I'm trying to help somebody from making a poor decision. Sorry that I have fuckload of experience with these interfaces and I know what I'm talking about.

I've got an Aardvark Q10 and a Wamirack right in front of me, and I would not recomend it to anybody.

[Randall]

in all your knoledge and experience it seems you would know that WDM drivers are not supported under win 98, I'm using mine under XP and have no latency issues/complaints. I use it primarily to midown into wavelab at 192K and this thing Rocks for this purpose,(and sounds excellent Mr. bigtime pro user)by my experience with EGOSYS I forsee no problems transfering 16 or more tracks at a time into whatever APP I decide to use when the Maxio is released,nuendo currently,outdated? gimme a break 192k-DVD-A interfaces have,nt been around long enough at the consumer level to be considered outdated,but,perhaps your already doing DSD,,personally,I have my doubts

[Katrina]

okay guys. if you could all stop waving your dicks around and chill out, that would be just as helpful as giving me some good advice about drivers & digital interfaces.

thanks.

[joelpatterson]

Please--not to underestimate the importance of dick waving for context and believability. Authority as well. Is very strange, male dominated industry.

[rhythm ranch]

Well said Katrina! You go girl!

[Rick Hunter]

I am standing on my couch waving my dick around yelling, "BUY A MOTU 828",my roomate is looking very confused....

[wenzel.hellgren]

"in all your knoledge and experience it seems you would know that WDM drivers are not supported under win 98, I'm using mine under XP and have no latency issues/complaints. I use it primarily to midown into wavelab at 192K and this thing Rocks for this purpose,(and sounds excellent Mr. bigtime pro user)by my experience with EGOSYS I forsee no problems transfering 16 or more tracks at a time into whatever APP I decide to use when the Maxio is released,nuendo currently,outdated? gimme a break 192k-DVD-A interfaces have,nt been around long enough at the consumer level to be considered outdated,but,perhaps your already doing DSD,,personally,I have my doubts"

Where did I say anything about WDM on Windows 98? Is all the dick waving bluring my vision?

You totally confused me with this post. The Wami Rack24 is only 96k compaible and doesn't do 192k. It also only supports 4 inputs, how are you transferring 16 inputs at a time? WTF are you talking about? Somehow you are doing 16 channel 192k transfers with a 4 channel 96k interface?

And yeah, the Wami-Rack is pretty out dated, it was released in 1998. The drivers came on a floppy disk.

[wenzel.hellgren]

I haven't compared the Q10 preamps directly to any others, but they sound good in the non colored accurate sound way. I tend to have problems running the Q10 at low latency on a P4 1.8 Ghz. I can get it down to around 7ms with ASIO Turbo Mode, but performance really suffers when running that low. But it does have direct zero latency hardware monitoring, so if you don't need to monitor with effects and don't play soft synths live, you can get away with high latencies for recording. I'm not sure what latencies it can get with WDM and Cakewalk.

It is unstable sometimes, and if it crashes you have to reboot the computer to get access to the interface back. We tried it on 4 different machines in the office here and it didn't work on any of them (up to 1ghz PIII) without huge dropouts even at high latency.

It is a pain to configure, because there is a separate app for the ASIO config (separate from the mixer and other config. panel). Input gain can only be controlled via software (no gain pots).

But the headphone and monitor out knobs on the front are really cool. It also has 4 inserts if you use outboard gear. Unfortunately they are hard wired to inputs 1-4 but you can work around them by changing inputs. Line inputs are 1/4 only and XLR are mix inputs only. TRS outputs are nice though.

I hope this helps. But I don't know what I'm talking about and I was just told this from a ProTools user, right?

When it all comes down to it, I use the Q10 as the main interface on one of the studio computers without a mixer (just the Q10 direct to the monitors). It works great for this purpose. If you don't need ultra low latency , it's cool for the built in pre-amps, etc. I've learned to live with it's faults and we get along Ok till it crashes.


And it comes with Pro Audio 9, which is cool if you do not already have a digital multitrack/sequencing app.