corax wrote:

Fullofkittens wrote:

Rather than get a nice soundcard, the dude from Four Tet had an awesome idea: a soundblaster audigy has optical ins and outs, and you can get a DAT recorder used cheaper than a really high-end soundcard. Then he just uses the DA converters on that and has his monitors connected to the DAT player. Interesting low-cost solution.

The Audigy's 10k2 DSP is hard-wired to an internal 48kHz oscillator, so it can't sync to an external SPDIF source at any rate. (Creative had to cut corners somewhere to keep costs low.) The Audigy has to resample all external SPDIF input and cram it through low-quality hardware anti-aliasing filters (more cost-cutting) before feeding it to the 10k2 DSP. So the 48kHz SPDIF that comes out the other end of the Audigy DSP is nowhere near bit-perfect.

You can bypass the DSP and record SPDIF directly to the hard disk, but you will lose all DSP features, including mixing and effects.