Souncard for sale (ESI Maxio032, professional 4xADAT)

[Jouni]

I'm selling my ESI MaXiO 032 soundcard as I have no use for it anymore.

Price £245, roughly 266 euros or 349 USD. Includes shipping with insurance within EU countries and to the USA. Other countries I will have to check per request if I can offer it as included.

MaXiO032 is a great soundcard for modular studio setup. You can connect up to four (!) ADAT devices with optical cables. There are range of ADAT devices available starting from simple AD/DA interfaces to SPDIF input/output interfaces and digital mixers with ADAT expansions to route all channels individually to your DAW. Example S|C A16 Ultra and XLR or for cheaper alternatives Behringer's similar ADA8000 and Alesis AI4 or AI4 (available on second hand market at very reasonable prices). One (but not the only!) example of digital mixer is Behringer DDX3216 which supports ADAT through expansions. All it takes is 8 optical cables to connect all the 32 input and 32 output channels.

More information on ESI's webpage:
http://www.esi-audio.com/products/maxio032/

Please use the the eBay listing to buy, questions as forum PM are fine:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... 0307960709

Picture of the actual soundcard for sale:

[Jouni]

I have updated the price a bit down. Very reasonable offer!

[Richard]

True, it costs 629 EUR new on Thomann.

[Jouni]

Sounds about right. Thomann does not offer this card anymore, but the more recent version. Drivers on both cards are the same, only difference is that the new one is PCIe instead of PCI and the breakout box is white. Other than that both are basically identical in terms of sound quality and features.

[bones]

Pretty specialised bit of gear, I would have thought. Who would want one outside a commercial studio? Surely hard-drives made ADAT obsolete years ago?

[Jouni]

Maybe you are confusing with DAT now.

ADAT is just connection like optical SPDIF, but tranfers 8 channels of 24-bit/48kHz audio. There are many ADAT devices are interfaces available which can be connected to this soundcard. Ie. you could connect a digital mixer with few cables and get all the tracks as individual inputs without too much cable hassle - plus it's all digital. It is very modular way of extending the "breakout box" to suit your needs up to 32 input AND 32 output channels.

Of course the ADAT interface could be a 8-channel DAT tape recorder, if you need such. My setup is two Alesis AI3 interfaces (8 analog input/output interface) and one Creamware Ultra A16 (16 analog input/output interface).

[bones]

In my experience ADAT was a digital tape recorder made by Alesis that could track 8 mono channels and could be chained together for 16, 24 or 32 channel mixes. I had no idea it had uses beyond that. Still, what use would a digital mixer be outside a commercial studio? We all have digital mixers in Orion.

[Jouni]

It was just one use for it. Of course you don't have use for multiple audio inputs or outputs. I use this for the basic A/D D/A interfaces to get all my hardware synthesizers to individual inputs for realtime software monitoring, effect and mixing on the Orion's software mixer.

In a sense, my hardware synths act a bit like sofware synths in terms of usability. ie. I can sequence directly in Orion while mixing on the mixer and applying effects.

Back to the topic, I'm selling this old card as I have no use for it because I replaced with another ADAT soundcard.

[suecae_sounds]

A very reasonable price. Unfortunatly I am not building a new system any time soon, I simply cannot afford it.

On my stationary I got an old EMU APS. It does it's job in a splendid way, but I still miss some things. It's eight years old, after all.