E-MU tracker

[GK]

I’m selling some stuff to fund a desperately needed PC upgrade and I figure I might as well budget for a decent sound card for audio testing.

I’m currently considering the E-MU Tracker Pre:
E-MU Systems - Tracker Pre USB 2.0 - USB Audio/MIDI Interfaces

At $150 USD it seems a bargain. Has anyone else used one of these? Any good? The software bundle that comes with the unit is probably pretty useless as far as audio measurements go. I know of RMAA, but what other (free or not very expensive) software is available? THD, IMD and spectrum analysis is what I’m mostly interested in.

EDIT: D'oh, totally forgot about this thread:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/solid...asurments.html

[lousymusician]

I got a Tracker a few weeks ago (without having seen the thread you linked), and it seems just dandy to me. I'm running either ARTA or HOLMImpulse measurement software under 32 bit XP. Both work well. Doesn't sound terrible as a source, either, though not as good as a good 'audiophile' DAC.

[GK]

That ARTA package looks impressive. I’ll probably get a PC package with Windows 7. Have you encountered any difficulties with the driver software? There were a few complaints over driver software compatibility issues with different versions of Windows.

[MJL21193]

I'm running Win 7 Professional and it has XP software support. It seems to run all of my XP programs just fine. It runs them from a second "program files(x86)" location:

117.jpg

No problems with anything so far

[ikoflexer]

I got an E-MU 0404 which is, as far as I can tell almost the same thing as the tracker pre. I was hoping to use it for measurements, but after reading that thread I'm not sure it's good enough.

I had no problems with the drivers. Installed on a laptop running XP, hoping to run tests while on battery (the laptop). The 0404 and I think the tracker pre have a nasty little smps 5V/1A supply which I'm planning to replace with good shunt reg.

If I were to do it again, I'd probably have a really good looks at the Virtins device that has better sampling rates.

[GK]

Hmmm..
I've just been playing around with RMAA on my crappy 750MHz AMD Win98 machine (motherboard sound with about 30dB s/n ratio) , on which it refuses to run properly.

It does not seem possible to set the spectrum window to span greater than 20kHz. I also noticed that the sample screen shot of the ARTA spectrum analyser window, over at the ARTA site.....

http://www.fesb.hr/~mateljan/arta/images/sp-window.gif

.....shows 20Hz - 20kHz. When I think about it, a cannot recall having ever seen a screen shot (here or elsewhere) of one of these programs showing a spectrum window that extends beyond 20kHz. A 192kHz sampling rate should return something comparable to an 80kHz measurement bandwidth.

Can any of these freebie (or non-freebie) programs take advantage of the higher sampling rates of the more capable sound cards and actually show at least a few harmonics of 20kHz????

[lousymusician]

Originally Posted by GK

Can any of these freebie (or non-freebie) programs take advantage of the higher sampling rates of the more capable sound cards and actually show at least a few harmonics of 20kHz????

It looks like HOLMImpulse will. AFAICT, ARTA only supports up to 48 kHz sampling, HOLMImpulse supports 192kHz. The response window extends to 96 kHz by default.

[Pjotr]

Originally Posted by lousymusician

It looks like HOLMImpulse will. AFAICT, ARTA only supports up to 48 kHz sampling, HOLMImpulse supports 192kHz. The response window extends to 96 kHz by default.

I have a Tracker as well. It perform pretty good with Arta on my XP laptop. It works pretty good with 96 kHz and 192 kHz SR. But in practice you cannot use it anyway above 48 kHz SR, simply because noise rises steeply above 35 kHz input signal. For LS measurements it does the job fine and you can even hook-up a standard electret mic capsule directly to the 3.5 mm jack input.

Nasty thing is, it puts some 150 MB of drivers on your HDD And switching between sample rates doesn’t go automatic from the driving program (only with ASIO, which Arta doen't support). You have to do that manually from the E-MU control panel. For listening purposes the thing is ok but no more than average.

My PCI M-Audio Audiophile192 performs a lot better, but is a bit difficult to get in a laptop