buy used ews 64xl

[martin]

hello everybody,

right now i'm using an sblive!
i'm considering to buy a used ews 64xl.
i'll mainly use it as a sampler and some nice effects would be fine to.

would you recommend this card?

ist it's sound / effect quality comparable to the live?

are there different hardware versions i've to be aware of?

are there differences in quality in these different versions (e.g. bug fixing)?

is it a problem that the card is only isa?

is the card still supported by terratec. it's pretty old?

thanx in advance

martin

[bjorn]

The EWS64 has generally better sound quality than the SBLIVE. The AD/DA is 18 bit. The onboard effect, however are no good. I never use them. As a sampler the card is very cool. And I also use it for hard disk recording and get good results from it. If you use it as a sampler it shouldn't cause you any problems that the card is ISA. But if you want to do HD recording I would recomend a PCI card due to higher transfer speed.
I'd say that if you get the card cheap with - let's say 32 MB onboard - I'd buy it since it is nice not having to use the computer RAM for samples like you have to do with the SBLIVE.

I'm happy with the card, but feel that Terratec doesn't work much on new drivers etc for it. The current MM drivers are good quality though. ASIO 2 drivers are in beta state and I haven't heard to much about the quality of them.

/bjorn