Hardware Overview: The Latest on ASIO Support

September 26, 1998 -- Steinberg, the market leader of music sofware on both Macintosh and Windows platforms, today announced that more and more hardware manufacturers are supporting the Steinberg ASIO (Audio Stream Input Output) standard.

ASIO is a standardized way of describing the communication between audio software and a piece of audio hardware. It enables audio hardware manufacturers to write optimized drivers for their hardware. For a user, the knowledge that an ASIO exists is a sign that there can be a performance boost, and often reduced through monitoring delays, compared with the same audio card without an ASIO driver.

Event Electronics now have a Macintosh ASIO driver available for the Layla card. It can be downloaded directly from the Event web site at www.event1.com.

Digidesign and Steinberg have jointly developed a Macintosh ASIO driver for all Pro Tools PCI cards including the d-24 card to enable 24-bit resolution with Cubase VST/24.

Creamware have announced that their new Pulsar card, due for release this month, will include ASIO drivers for Windows. The card, which includeds a 32-channel mixer, EQ, dynamics, delay, synthesis and a high-performance sample player that will offer 24-bit resolution and 96kHz support.

MOTU have announced that their new 2408 computer-based hard disk recording system for Mac and Windows is shipping with ASIO drivers which will allow it to work together with Cubase VST for both Mac and Windows.

MetaLithic Systems have also recently announced that they intend shipping their Elite Studio Hardware with ASIO drivers for Windows. The hardware includes 32-bit PCI card and 10 x 10 breakout box with 8 balanced analog I/Os and SPDIF I/O, and provides exceptional sound quality due to 20-bit conversion and careful A/D, D/A conversion engineering.

Finally, Opcode's new VisionDSP will not only ship with support for ASIO drivers, but also supports VST-compatible effects.

Digital audio hardware manufacturers that already support ASIO include: Lexicon, Digidesign, Event, Creamware, Sonorus, Yamaha, Korg.

For more information, visit their web site at www.steinberg.net.