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Topic: Pio2001, stop bragging! (Read 6327 times) previous topic - next topic
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Pio2001, stop bragging!

I wanted to find HA user opinions on the Marian Marc 2 audio card, and guess what the search delivers: 11 topics where Pio2001 is telling people he's got one. Not one hit with useful info!!!
...


Sorry Pio, just kidding ofcourse!

But probably this attracts your attention, too. Could you tell me how you like it? Edit: how you like the Marc 2, that is.

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #1 –
Of course nobody else has got one, it's twice as expensive as an MAudio Audiophile or a Terratec 6Fire, and it's got 20 % of their features !

No 3D sound, no Dolby, no multichannel, no midi, not even a mixer, not even a volume/balance setting for the digital out !
The MAudio Audiophile was just out when I bought it, and if I knew then what I know now, I would have bought it instead, but at this time, I only considered Emagic Audiowerk, Marian Marc 2, Guillemot Maxi Studio Isis, Terratec DMX soundsystem and Midiman Delta DIO 2448.

The Marian was (and is still ) the only one to advertise bit exact playback without resampling nor dithering on top of its datasheet ! It seems it's its only purpose : exact digital record and playback. You can't even scale the digital recording : you can only capture it as it is. Plus, both coaxial and optical SPDIF in/out are soldered on the board (unlike the M Audiophile, for example, where coax hang outside, I don't like it, it must be fragile).

The Midiman Delta DIO should provide the same features for cheaper, but I'm not certain that it doesn't resample, I just suppose it.

Edit : It's not even possible to play games like UT2003. Under Windows98, it worked if I routed the analog out to the digital out, but with XP, no way. It skips like hell. I must use an SB64 for gaming. DVD skips too with direct digital playback (though about once every 10 minutes), I must set the soft to analog out, and route the analog to digital (because my hifi is connected to the digital out, otherwise, the analog out is fine).
Edit : wait, no, it's not UT2003 that skips, it's Amrerican McGee's Alice. UT2003 runs at a sample rate different than 32, 44.1, or 48 kHz, therefore my DAC can't play it.

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #2 –
Thanks for replying so quickly!

Well, I like it, since I don't need midi, but spdif through both coax and toslink is nice...
And, around here it costs slightly less than an Audiophile or DIO2496.

Small questions:
how is the analog out? Comparable with the Audiophile?
can the analog out drive some modest headphones? (Philips HP890)

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #3 –
The problem is that the computer is far from the hifi.
Using 7 meters of poor CINCH cables, the sound is muffled, compared to 5 meters of SPDIF and one meter of CINCH. I doesn't seem to be the soundcard, because the sound doesn't seem muffled when the headphones are plugged into the analog out. But here's another problem, the headphones get a completely different sound from the 80W Arcam Diva ampli than from the soundcard.
So I can't tell, because I don't know what to compare with.
I've always found 330 Ohm headphones out from real amplifiers much better than any custom headphone output with no real ampli.
The max volume is weak with AKG K400 headphones (but these headphones are very weak), must be around 70-80 db. With Senheiser HD600 (normal headphones), it's rather 90 db. Difficult to guess.

I don't know if the muffling comes from the soundcard or from the 7 meters of cable. I'll setup a blind test between cables (after the MPC tests, if I have the time, I'd dead busy).

Edit : did you see my above edit about gaming ?

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #4 –
Yeah, I saw the edit. What's "gaming"? 

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #6 –
Must share my joy...

Just got this card, second-hand. Still figuring things out... (like how to get DirectSound support). But very happy!

Oh, and for me output is more than powerful enough. I only have some old Academy Studio monitors available for listening atm, which are somewhat bass-booming. I can't bear having volume sliders upwards of -40dB in the Marian control panel!

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #7 –
I have a few problems that I can't solve...

using foobar 0.56b with DirectSound output gives an extremely high level of hiss. This happens in 16bit mode (24bit doesn't work). Latest ActiveX installed

using ASIO plug-in (version 0.7) gives skipping every now and then, even when thread priority is set to real-time (!) and buffer maximized.

WaveOut seems flawless in any mode (up to 32bit), and sounds fine to me. I can't however compare it to proper DirectSound, which has that terrible hiss.

KernelStreaming: no devices are displayed (OS is Win2k SP1). But if I understand well, this is normal since it requires driver support, or?

What can I do to fix DirectSound?

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #8 –
Same here : DirectSound hisses. It appeared upgrading from Windows98 to Windows XP pro. DirectSound was OK with Windows98.

Also, there was a DirectSound panel in the Windows98 drivers, that has disappeared in the WinXP drivers (it was between "synchronisation" and "misc/about" in the settings).
And there was two Marian devices listed in the DirectSound output plugin of Winamp for each output : one plain, and one emulated. In WinXP, the plain ones have disappeared.

It seems the card doesn't support DirectSound with WinXP. I don't care since I have the wave out in Winamp, that is bit exact, and I need a SoundBlaster anyway for the games (even in Win98 it was a disaster).
You should ask Marian.de about it. You can give them a link to this thread if they don't understand the problem, so that they see that it's not only you.

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #9 –
Thanks, I'll do that.

Under Win2k, waveout doesn't seem to be bit-exact with this card, btw. I didn't thoroughly examine it yet, but with RMAA I find nonzero THD and IMD when looping digital out - digital in. This is the case for 16bit and 32bit modes. On 24bit mode, values are the same as when I do not loop the wave file through the card (so probably perfect).

I will do some recording and direct wav-compare later (I couldn't because I wanted to use EAC for that but it crashes).

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #10 –
Quote
using foobar 0.56b with DirectSound output gives an extremely high level of hiss. This happens in 16bit mode (24bit doesn't work). Latest ActiveX installed.

Same problem here with W2K. Seems solved with FooBar 0.57
--
Ge Someone
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #11 –
Thanks for the tip. I tried it just now, but it didn't help.

And apparently, Marian is still more Win98SE minded at the moment (many recording nuts are it seems). I was going to email them, when I found this on their website: "Further, the DirectSound and GSIF area is of interest, in which the audio delay (latency) can be set individually. These options are currently available with drivers for Windows™ 95/98/ME only." 

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #12 –
Did you think to set the clock to "digital input" before looping back ? Only this way the recording can be bit exact.

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #13 –
Quote
Did you think to set the clock to "digital input" before looping back ? Only this way the recording can be bit exact.

Yup, I got that right (however, it is really a pain to get the loop working every time - I keep switching back and forth in the driver settings until I get lucky and digital input locks onto itself).

RMAA finds rather high IMD results in all analog loop modes (typically 0.050% in 24bit modes), and still some IMD in 32bit and 16bit digital loop modes. Looking at the graphs, I see grass everywhere  ...

edit: oh, but apart from bad measurements, the card sounds great all the same

edit2: I finally managed to bit-compare a recording through digital loop with the original: no differences, bit perfect after all! Sorry, I really thought THD and IMD should have been negligible on bit perfect loops. Thinking again, I now realize there should be some slight distortions, since a 44kHz/16bit file has no infinite resolution.

Still, I think THD/IMD in analog loops is really bad; e.g. running in 24/96 mode with signals at 19 and 20kHz shows peaks at 18 and 21kHz as high as -74dB. Funny enough, RMAA reports a sweet noise level of -102dBA - how can that be? I thought IMD was in part determining SNR?

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #14 –
Quote
edit2: I finally managed to bit-compare a recording through digital loop with the original: no differences, bit perfect after all! Sorry, I really thought THD and IMD should have been negligible on bit perfect loops. Thinking again, I now realize there should be some slight distortions, since a 44kHz/16bit file has no infinite resolution.

THD and IMD are not 0 with reference signals in RMMA 16 bit mode, see http://www.kikeg.arrakis.es/measurements/a...samp_48%20K.htm , "digital 16-bit perfect" results.

However, they are very small and can be considered negligible.

IMD peaks at -74 dB is rather high, that's strange. However, it is not related to background noise levels, since these are measured in absence of high-level signal, which is the one that wrecks the IMD measurements.

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #15 –
I've put some RMAA measurements online: 16/44 here and 24/96 here. The IMD graphs are very Audigy-like I think. Also, stereo crosstalk goes bad in the high frequency range.

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #16 –
Quote
Also, stereo crosstalk goes bad in the high frequency range.

I had a similar problem with my Aureon. Results varied though, chaotically: Sometimes the crosstalk would grow logarithmically at other times it would be constantly high at high frequencies.

Alexey Lukin said in the Rightmark forum that it might be an RMAA-problem.

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #17 –
Quote
IMD peaks at -74 dB is rather high, that's strange.

I was badly hoping this was all due to the drivers. So, hoping that the Win98SE drivers were better (they seemed more worked over), I went through a whole ~!@#$% Win98SE install procedure with all the updates and drivers etc, only to find the problem persisted... 

Rethinking, since it is unlikely that semi-pro card drivers would mess up wave data, it is probably a hardware flaw after all.  Intermodulation products couldn't arise from bad cabling, could they?

edit: I made a more detailed IMD graph using the higher resolution rmaa 5 pre-release2, http://www.xs4all.nl/~hetzwaan/Marc2_IMD.png
 

Pio2001, stop bragging!

Reply #18 –
Cables could cause that only if you had something like a dirty or near-broken audio connector.

Chances are that it is due to the card. Still, at first I think that IMD would not be that high in practice. But I can't say for sure.