rokn4jc

I bought a Firestudio a month or so back, at a great price, so i figured if it didn't work out I could sell it w/o loss. I use Sonar 7 PE primarily. Computer: Older socket 939 Opteron Dual @ 2.7 ghz with 2 gb ram, TI Firewire card. Win XP w/ minor audio tweaks (mainly just disabled all un needed hardware and a few services, in a DAW profile) SATA drives I am using the Beta drivers right now (3.1.1.103) with good success. Avoid the beta drivers 3.1.2.103 as they do not work well with Sonar at all, only 1 core is utilized in Sonar and dropouts/crackles are abundant. With this setup @ 256 buffer setting I can get 15-20 instances of the VC under the DAWBench Sonar benchmark without any problems. Crackles a bit above that but even at 90% CPU utilization, no dropouts. System ran for 3 hours under this benchmark setup (20 VC's) no hiccups or crashes, recording 8 tracks the entire time. I hope this answers your question, as I am at the moment satisfied with the combo of my FS 2626 and Sonar. Initial drivers were not so good, but it seems that Presonus is working it out, finally !

I just sold one (omni + delta 66) a while back for $100, so that is around the current price. Deffinately go for the Omni if that is what you are going to get. It was pretty good for what it did, the conversion was ok, not great but not terrible. Latency was good, though there will be very little flexibility in the routing. The system was always very stable. The Delta series is getting long in the tooth by now as it has been around for a while. I am currently using a Mackie Onyx satellite and for the $ IMO it is a real good piece. The preamps are quite good as is the conversion, and it gives you lots of routing options as long as you don't need to record more than 2 tracks at a time. It will fill my needs until I can afford/need/justify something more high end.

There are probably better converters out there now, but the price on the Delta 1010's (~ $350) is pretty good. I've had a Delta 66 for about three years now, and it sounds pretty decent. Not great, but decent. The routing is not as flexible as some interfaces (at least on the 66), meaning you can't really assign inputs and outputs. The Delta stuff is good enough to capture good mic pre's, and you can stack them for more i/o. In my experience they are solid, and I haven't had any trouble out of mine. Plus they are PT compatible if that matters. For a few more $ maybe look at the Echo Audiofire or Layla interfaces. Those get good reviews, and from what I hear are pretty solid. The audiofire 8 is about $500.