Here's a preliminary review of the Catalina card. First, a little history:
I had been looking for an audio card that supports optical in, as there is some audio material I want to grab off my DirecTiVo, and since the DTivo is a bit bucket, I wanted to stay in the digital domain if at all possible.
My first stab at it was with a Chaintech AV-515M, which costs about $20 from Newegg. This is an affordable card with an optical-in that uses the C-Media chipset. At first, I was excited to get it working (FYI, DTiVos output at 48Khz, 16-bits) and thought all was good and dandy, and started to capture music from DirecTV Freeview and the various musical performances on the Talk Shows.
Then, I came across last week's "On the Record with Bob Costas," which featured Liz Phair performing an acoustic version of "Extraordinary", and as I listened to the resulting WAV files, my ears began to curdle. After some exhaustive A/B testing and tinkering with the W2K HAL (i.e. Standard PC vs ACPI vs ACPI Uniprocessor), I noticed that the S/PDIF monitor to speakers sound great as expected, but the resulting WAV had all kinds of audible distortion. Locating a block diagram on C-Media's website, I found that the monitor circuit went directly to audio out, while recording passes through a DSP.
Technically, this should have been a simple binary file transfer from the source to the PC, but some distortion got introduced along the way. Again, monitor sound great, recorded wavs did not. I haven't noticed it before as most of the material I captured was rock, so distortion was par for the course and was not terribly evident. The distortions became really noticable when it came to acoustic and vocals.
After some more surfing, I saw that TB had introduced the Catalina recently, and the reviews on the Sudhian forum thus far have not been encouraging. Having not much to lose, I picked up the OEM version from Newegg for $50+, and swapped it in just now to see how it performs.
Some quirks: if you choose Digital In as your source, all playback sources get disabled, though you can monitor the Digital In. To play back audio, you have to manually switch it back to speaker output. It's basically one or the other.
The verdict: Wow! The WAVs came out as expected, with none of the distortions. And to think I almost started to think of playing musical Toslink cables to try to isolate the problem.
For my intended use i.e. Digital-In recording, this card is SOLID, though it is quirky to have to manually switch between Digital In and playback. I don't have a 7.1 speaker system nor play games on my PC, so I can't really speak to those applications, but for the $50+ (OEM version), it's money well spent.
Anyone interested in my two test recordings can contact me directly. Hope this Helps!
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