Terra Tec EWS88MT
I bought this used audio interface a few months ago, after about 4 months of waiting for the right price on Ebay. I had my eye on the Terra Tec units as a first choice for a multi channel analog input audio interface. The key points for my decision were 1 the breakout box can be installed in an empty 5.25” drive bay “very convenient and neat” (it can also be used externally if you desire.) 2 the advertised technical specifications are very competitive with all of the other prosumer cards I was looking at, infact in several aspects it exceeds them. The EWS88MT supports sample rates up to 96Khz at 24bit resolution, but here is the interesting part; It sends the audio data stream to your computer in 32 bit packets. The extra 8 bits are empty data, but what they do is streamline the data flow to your processor by avoiding the awkward division of 24 bits in to a 32 bit bus, which all the other cards create.
So how does it all work in reality? Well at first I was disappointed and scratching my head over unacceptable hiccups in the recordings, but it turns out that this was really do to software issues. After installing a trial version of soundforge 7.0 the quality of my test recordings were absolutely perfect from what I could hear. I always did get some minor artifacts with my old software and a standard 16 bit sound card, but at only 16 bits a minor hiccup is not all that noticeable, but with 24 bit audio it’s another story; when the majority of what you are hearing is absolutely pristine and full of dynamic range, (dam near 110db) any little defect in the audio stream will stand out like a sore thumb.
The EWS88MT also has a 2-channel coaxial digital input and output, but I do not have other compatible equipment to test them.
The EWS88MT also has MIDI in and MIDI out ports. I tested the response of the MIDI in using a MIDI keyboard and a soft synth from Orion Platinum. Lets just say that I was very impressed. My former experiences with playing any soft synth from a MIDI keyboard always were unplayably laggy, With the EWS88MT however lag time was completely unnoticeable, and playability was as good as that of a self contained unit.
So far so good, but what about the drivers? As usual this is where some of the best hardware can fall short, but not to bad in this case. The drivers for the EWS88MT appear to be very stable, and allow for reasonably good control of routing, monitoring, level control and so on, but the system sound output, (intended for playing non proaudio program sounds) uses an odd resolution of 18 bits, while this is technically a better resolution than the standard 16 bits, I have found that some of my programs, such as Musicmatch, had trouble using this output. They were able to play, but the sound was very glitchy. As a result I run these programs out of the pro level 24 bit outputs, which sound fantastic, but the draw back is that you cannot use the windows system volume control for these outputs.
On the opposite end, WinDVD did not see the 24 bit outputs, but played well using the 18 bit system sound output.
Over all I am quite satisfied with this unit, and the inconvenience with the drivers is a minor price to pay for the ability to record at prostudio quality up to 8 channels simultaneously with up to 96 KHz sample rate and 24 bit audio.
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