The new line of ASI564x series linear PCI Express sound cards expands AudioScience‘s family of products based on PCI Express. The company’s Stephen Turner said this development makes PCI Express more accessible via a lower price point.
The manufacturer described the ASI564x series as “junior partners” of its ASI6600 series of PCI Express sound cards, used in radio station automation.
“The new cards retain high end features such as +24dBu balanced analog audio with 110dB dynamic range, together with AES/EBU digital I/O with hardware sample rate converters on all inputs,” it stated. “Multi-channel support is standard. Using the surround sound extensions (SSX), streams of up to eight channels may be played, recorded and mixed. These cards are ideal for applications such as radio production and automation systems that do not require DSP based MPEG compression.”
The series contains three models. The ASI5640 provides four stereo/eight mono I/O with balanced analog interfaces. The ASI5641 has four stereo/eight mono I/O with AES/EBU interfaces. And the ASI5644 has four stereo/eight mono I/O with both balanced analog and AES/EBU interfaces.
“As technology marches on, free PCI slots are becoming harder to find in modern computers,” Turner stated. “PCI Express is really where the future lies.”
Drivers are provided for Vista, Vista-64, Windows XP, Server 2003, as well as for Linux. SDKs are available for Windows and Linux using either standard APIs such as DirectSound or ALSA, or the proprietary AudioScience HPI and ASX interfaces.
Booth: N8313
