Are there also drivers for USB DACs?

[DJNUBZ]

I'm curious if there are also drivers for USB DACs? Is anyone already using AISO drivers already? If so how low is your latency?

[kevinkr]

I've used the M-Audio Transit USB dac with ASIO and it has proprietary drivers - in fact it will not work without them. (Since the actual end device firmware was loaded after it enumerated) I don't remember the amount of latency, but I was running it with a pretty low powered laptop, and it was significant.

[DJNUBZ]

Boy, between iPhone spellcheck and my sloppy typing it's hard to tell what I am talking about. I am curious about ASIO drivers for USB DACs (ie. Gigawork USB dac).

[kevinkr]

Try to look for a USB dac that has native ASIO support at the driver level. You can also sometimes use ASIO4ALL to provide most of the functionality of ASIO, but at some point it has to be converted to a protocol the particular dac and/or OS kernel supports.

This may be much less of an issue with newer versions of Windows and with Linux.. (ASIO IIRC was a work around for various windows xp kernel issues where latency and unwanted sample rate conversion, the kmixer, etc.. were issues.)

[SoNic_real_one]

Windows has native drivers only for USB 1.1... That limits the audio to 2 channels, 16 bit, 48kHz.
For USB 2.0 you need drivers from the cip/card manufacturer. ASIO cannot provide that by itself. ASIO4ALL works with the WDM drivers so... it still needs drivers.