M2Tech Hiface vs Musiland Monitor 01 USD

[SunRa]

Hi all,

I was just wondering, has anyone experience with both of these two interfaces? I would really want to know if spending more for the m2Tech worths it!

Thank you!

[glt]

In my opinion it is best to spend the least money as the technology is moving very rapidly in this area. Before you know it you will be upgrading to the next thing.

[TheShaman]

Get the M2Tech if you can afford it.
I had the Musiland and sold it as soon as I tried the M2Tech.

[soundcheck]

My two cents:

I would not recommend to buy interfaces which are running on a specific
operating system only and beside that need a proprietary driver to do so.



Cheers

[SunRa]

Thank you for your replies.

Now, I think these two designs are quite similar so it boils down to how the clock is generated, especially for non standard sampling rates. I know the M2Tech has two crystals so no PLL wizardry here. Don't know about the musiland. Any info?

I intend not to use the spdif connection but tap on the I2S, that should further remove any differences.

Soundcheck, as far as I remember these two are not offering any driver for linux, do you know any options?

[glt]

The clocks in the Musiland are derived by the DCMs in the FPGA. This means integer multiplication and division in the FPGA. The clocks in the hiface MAY be manipulated by the DCMs (somewhere the clock frequency has to be divided because spdif frequency is much lower than the clocks)

[TheShaman]

M2Tech runs on all recent versions Windows and MacOS. If you plan on using it with Linux you'll be disappointed (at least for now).
I'm not sure how the development on Linux drivers goes for Musiland or if it supports MacOS. In Windows it was fine (though the various "clock flavors" on the drivers put me off).

[adelias]

I have to agree with soundcheck regarding proprietary drivers. Take a look at the XMOS board. It runs on
standard USB audio class 2.0 drivers under Linux, Windows and MacOS. It offers I2S, Toslink, SPDIF and Analog outputs.

[TheShaman]

Guys, like it or not, Linux users are a minority.
Check data of April 2010, for example:
Usage share of operating systems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If your gear works for Windows and MacOS you pretty much cover the 98% of the users out there.
Of course anyone is free to use whatever OS he wants, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to settle for lesser devices (see XMOS with it's placeholder clocks and Toslink transmitters, to name a few of it's drawbacks).
I personally buy my audio stuff to do the job they're supposed to do in the best possible way (preferably working out of the box with no tweaking or compatibility and driver issues in the O/S I use), not to make a statement.

At some point there will be Linux drivers for M2Tech as well but they'd still wouldn't go by the whole "open software" idea.
I don't like having to rely on proprietary drivers either but then again proprietary means protection of intellectual property which, in itself, translates to money; and money is what makes the world go around these days.
We can go into the whole communism/capitalism/whatever in some other forum (or sub-forum of diyaudio) but I'm sure in this one the moderators would rather we keep it technical and leave ideological discussions aside.

[northernsky]

Hi,

I have a M2tech interface working with a Mac. The italian distributor told me that the designer of the interface promised a Linux driver in a couple of months.

Northernsky