orogenicman

Hi folks. I'm a newbie here, so I just wanted to say hello and pass on my experience with the new Terratec DMX 6 Fire USB which I just purchased.

I have the old DMX 6 Fire with the breakout box that came out about the time the Audigy did. At the time I had the Soundblaster live with the breakout box, and boy did I hate it with Windows XP. They had so many problems with the drivers that it was ridiculous. So I scrapped it (meaning that I put it in my wife's computer, lol), and switched to the Terratec card. Boy was I glad I did. It was 24/96, and the breakout box was far superior.

I used it for six years, and it has served me very well with few problems. However, a few weeks ago I started having problems with it that I couldn't resolve. Age and use had finally taken it's toll on the old girl, so I decided to look around and see what was available. By chance I decided to see what Terratec had available, knowing that I didn't want to go with their Aureons. I wanted to upgrade to a more capable system (but I didn't want to dish out the money for a LAYA), or at least something comparable to what I already had.

And of course, they've released the upgrade to the DMX 6 Fire, the DMX 6 Fire USB. I was a bit leary at first about going with a USB system, since I am not a fond admirer of USB devices, or the USB port. But it had all the features I was looking for and more, so I plunked down the bucks to get the system.

And this is where I made my first mistake. When I purchased the old DMX 6, Terratec was selling them in the U.S. Apparently, they no longer sell direct here (and apparently don't have any outlets here either). But I took a chance and purchased one fronm the factory in Germany anyway. It's a USB device, right? And they have UK drivers, because they sell in the UK. It should work.

It was more expensive than I had anticipated (because of the exchange rates, and shipping costs), but I digress. Anyway, it arrived within about a week, which was impressive. I unpacked the system, and my first surprise (stupid me, I didn't even consider it), was that they had shipped a European power supply (230 v, 50 Hz to 12 v 1.5 amps). Oops.

I e-mailed them, and was told that because they don't sell them in the U.S., they didn't have an American power supply available, but that I could purchase one that had a 12 v 1.5 amp power output rating, and it would work. Oh well, they should have sent me one because I paid for the thing, or gave me credit or something, but I wasn't going to wait another week or two, so I bought a power supply from Radio Shack for $24.

It works, but I made some discoveries about USB audio systems that have their own power supply. First, you have to connect the power supply to the USB audio device before you do anything else. Then you turn on the computer. When Windows XP is powered up, install the drivers. Only when installation tells you to connect the USB chord do you do so. Ok, a little quirky, but it worked.

I immediately found out that the driver out of the box was crap. (new systems usually are that way, eh?). So I downloaded and installed the upgrade (1.0.3.01). Ok, that let me launch Sonar 7.01. But the MIDI wasn't working properly. After about 3 hours of trouble shooting, I went to Terratec's beta corner, and discovered a beta driver available that fixed the MIDI problem (it was a problem with using both MIDI in and MIDI out ports in parallel). So I installed the beta driver - problem solved. So now I get to play with it and test it's capabilities.

Ok, folks, here is the bottom line, at least, if and until they publish some better drivers (even then it might not fix the issues below). First of all, it has some really great features for an intermediate audio system. It has two line ins, and one balanced microphone in. It also had an Hi-z plug input for guitars and basses. That's going to be a really great feature, though I haven't used it yet. It has optical and coaxial ins and outs. and six stereo rca outs. The microphone input has gain control and 48 volt phantom for use with condenser mics. The hi-z input has a -20 db pad switch. The drawback for a lot of home studio people is that the inputs and outputs are all rca, except the Hi-z input and the one balanced mic input. It doesn't bother me because that's the way I have my home studio set up.

The good news is that I did a multi-track audio recording test using Adobe Audition 3.0, and it worked great. And to my surprise and delight, the audio recordings had ZERO noise. I expected this since the entire audio system is isolated from my rather noisy computer. But it was thrilling to actually record completely noise free tracks. The bad news (and I actually expected this but was hoping that it wouldn't be true), is that because it is a USB system, the latency with software synthesizers was very poor in Sonar, particularly with multiple software synths running. I was disappointed but not entirely surprised. With four sofware synths running, it was using up about 50% of the cpu cycles, compared with about 17% with the old DMX 6 fire (which is a PCI device). I'm hoping that they can resolve this somewhat with driver updates, but I'm not hopeful.

I'm not completely dissatisfied with it, since I can still hook it up to my brother's bands' mixing board and record them live for hours uninterrupted with clean results. But for my MIDI projects, I've had to come up with workarounds to the latency problem. and when I mean latency, don't confuse that with the ASIO latency, which I've got set at 8 ms (the best I could do with the old DMX was 11 ms), but will go down to 4. It's the heavy CPU usage due to the USB interface that is the real issue. My advice to Terratec is, first, if someone outside of Europe buys your USB product, make sure and send them a power supply they can use. Secondly, get rid of the USB interface and go with firewire.

dj_stick

latency is always a problem with USB devices - but as for your soft synth performance, set the ASIO latency to between 10 and 20ms for playback - CPU usage will drop significantly - keep it a bit higher when mixing/playing back, and only reduce it when tracking or playing in a part - you'll get a lot more use out of your system that way.

I've got a terratec midi interface, the Midi hubble - 2in/2out w/ 3 USB 1.1 ports - It was the best value 2/2 midi interface when i bought it, and the usb ports were an added bonus - perfect for iloks and other dongles (which is what i use them for) - had nothing but a great experience with them, transparent drivers in Windows, plug+play in OS X (no drivers needed)

but i've never tested one of their audio interfaces, so it's good to read a pretty decent review of one of them

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orogenicman

I am aware of the ASIO latency issue, but the problem is that the latency setting in the new DMX 6 Fire USB only goes to a maximum of 8 ms, and a minimum of 4 ms. Unless they change this with a driver update, there isn't much I can do about that (nothing at all, actually). With the older PCI version, I always set the latency to 11 ms, and it worked great.