Who would have thought…

… a new soundcard would give you so much joy!

I’ve been through quite a few soundcards since moving to a laptop and never really got along with any of them. First, I went down the USB route, using my NI Kore controller but got lots of glitches. Then a Novation XioSynth, less glitches but had to whack the latency up pretty high. Then I tried using ASIO4ALL with the onboard soundcard. Surprisingly, this gave the least glitches of all but shocking sound quality. Finally, I made the jump to Firewire via the Saffire LE – great sound, but more glitches and flakey as hell! (e.g. Random drop outs requiring a reboot about once an hour.) To be fair, the firewire implementation on my Dell Studio is meant to be pretty crap so it’s more likely to be that than the soundcard, but it was still annoying!

But then I found the Echo DJx. All I can say is WOW! Great sound, no glitches at all (!) and running drum racks in Ableton at 3ms latency! Finally, what I’m hearing from my headphones is exactly what I’m playing on the PadKontrol. And being an expresscard, it fits nicely on the side of my laptop with no nasty wires or PSU’s to contend with.

Now all I need is my APC40 to arrive, then I can start working out how to take ScarKord live!