ISIS, an obsolete card
Written: Apr 24 '02
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: external rack,flexibility,
integrated sampler,
mixer with zero latency,
MIDI
Cons: drivers highly unstable,
development stopped,
No decent ASIO2 drivers
The Bottom Line: I would suggest any musician who wants to buy a low-budget soundcard to look at other offers. ISIS does not catch up on today's demands.
|
|
|
| schtoum's Full Review: Guillemot Maxi Studio ISIS |
I have been 3 years ago the happiest owner of a Guillemot ISIS. Music is my hobby, and there was nothing like an integrated home studio with full duplex multi-recording capability at such a price then.
At that time, Software synth under the form of VST plugin was not popular yet.
There were only standalone software synth like Reaktor, VAZ+, and latency can be set to a decent 25ms on a DirectX driver.
Recording on the breakout box is a pleasure to handle, and the sound quality was uncompromised in 1999(48kHz/20bits).
The shipped software bundle was also amazing (a dedicated version of logic audio and plenty more) and the software mixer offers great control & flexibility over the 4 analog inputs + 2 analog outputs or 3 analog & 1 digital inputs and 1 analog & 1 digital output (optical/coax).
Guillemot even released a new version of the sampler application, much more intuitive that it's predecessor.
There was a problem thus: the 'memory manager', an app to distribute & access sounds over the onboard memory does crash very easily, leading to a dangerous instability of the overall sound system.
Then, on reboot, the system does not find the ISIS board.
You have to shutdown, restart...annoying.
Then came the ASIO2 era, with its plethora of VST plugins, and Guillemot did develop an ASIO driver for W98/2K.
This driver is meant to allow an extra low latency, of 10 ms or less. In fact, ASIO latency cannot be set to lower than 70ms, unless you want to play the windows freezing scenario, and the 'no ISIS card detected' on reboot.
This makes it invalid for playing VST synth modules from a midi keyboard, or monitoring your guitar throughout VST effects.
Worse, playing around with the driver will ruin your sequencer set-up, and most probably oblige you to re-install the sequencer...and windows.
This, not to mention the even-more-unstable-than-ever 'memory manager', leading you to no midi sound at all, unless shutdown, restart and... Pray.
So, great potential for that sound card, but no more development from the manufacturer, and there will be no XP driver (this is explained on their site), so no improvement to the present situation.
I assume the ISIS is still good enough in a pure direct-to-disk context, but that's all. And there is much better for that price (DELTA66, MIA?)
It is normal for a musician today to request extra-low latency, and ... stability.
I must say that I spend more time fixing crashes than making music, which is highly frustrating!
I will now (April 2002) buy a new soundcard, complying with the new standards.
For me, the ISIS is dead, and its life-time was short.
I have to recognise that it gave me access to a world of computer music I would not have accessed otherwise.
I find outrageous that the ISIS XL is still available on the market, and that XP drivers are not in the plan!
It was a pioneer.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 330
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
schtoum
|
|
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.