ASIO 2.0 Announced

The Next Level of Steinberg's Audio Stream Input Output Technology.

January 28, 1999 -- Hamburg/ Los Angeles - Steinberg specifies the next level of the ASIO technology. ASIO 2.0 further enhances the communication between audio - soft- and hardware. 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 that bypass the potentially high latency operating system mechanism for supporting audio hardware. This OS support is also often only stereo because of its multimedia background. For a user, the knowledge that an ASIO driver exists for a particular piece of hardware, is a sign that there will be a performance boost, compared with the same audio card configured to use the Operating System's own mechanism, and often an accompanying latency reduction, shown by reduced monitoring delays.

Who is in the ASIO Group already?

The Audio Stream In/Out (ASIO) technology has allowed many audio hardware designers to create drivers to link audio hardware to ASIO compatible hosts, avoiding the need to use either operating system support for audio hardware, or knowledge of the inner workings of the ASIO host application. ASIO technology has been licensed to Opcode for use in Vision DSP; Emagic and other companies are already using ASIO technology to support high performance multiple port audio cards such as Lexicon Studio, Digidesign's D24 card, Event's Layla, Gina and Darla, MOTU's 2408, Korg 12/12 and Sonorus StudI/O.

What's New in ASIO 2.0?

ASIO has been well received and now together with our development partners we have developed and released the ASIO 2.0 specification and developer tools. The new features build on the ASIO 1.0 specification to improve the ASIO user experience.

ASIO 2.0 Enhanced Sync options.

A mechanism has been added to allow sample accurate positioning. In its first version ASIO handled the synchronism of data being sent across the various outputs, but absolute positioning information was provided by MIDI Time Code. For most users this didn't pose a problem. However if data was transferred from an ADAT type device, the ‚absolute' positioning of the data transferred was effectively quantized to the nearest quarter frame; when transferring the data back, sample accurate placement back on the original device was not possible. ASIO 2.0 solves this problem by defining a protocol to define the absolute time. For instance, if a card has an ADAT port, it may provide time-code to ASIO and from there to the host, such that sample accurate sync is possible.

ASIO 2.0 Shares Hardware with other ASIO 2.0 Applications.

Now it is possible to have multiple ASIO 2.0 applications running on the same machine without the first one to get started grabbing the ASIO hardware for itself. As the applications are switched, the ASIO control is handed over to the next ASIO application. As more and more ASIO applications appear, this feature becomes more important.

Direct Monitoring Zero Latency Auditioning.

ASIO 2.0 implements an additional protocol that allows Direct Monitoring, avoiding the delays associated with Operating system buffering schemes and drivers. ASIO 1.0 already provided a mechanism for low latency through processing, where for example the 750 milliseconds of the Window Multimedia system can be reduced to 40 milliseconds for a well designed driver; ASIO 2.0 goes further and allows any ASIO input to be directly assigned to any ASIO output when the user engages the record monitor function in the application.

These changes are downwardly compatible with existing ASIO applications and hardware that supports the ASIO 1.0 protocol. For an application to benefit from these new features, both ASIO host application and supported hardware need to conform to the ASIO 2.0 protocol.

For developers the SDK, application forms and release dates are available at: http://service.steinberg.de/webdoc.nsf/show/development_e

For more information, visit Steinberg at http://www.steinberg.net/