Good sound card for Mackie Control Surface?
 

I just read an article you wrote from Vegas 5 regarding the Mackie Control Surface. The question I have is it appears to connect using sound cards with Midi ports. Whats a good card for this? I would prefer a high end audio card with XLR's and so on for broadcast grade monitoring. The second issue is 7.1 monitoring. Typically we select a different sound card for surround mixes. If switching cards, both would need Midi ports right? Is there and option out there for 7.1 AND the break outs for XLR's, SPDIFS, etc...?

Much Thanks

PS- your A room looks amazing! We are about 2 weeks away from completion on ours and it will be nice to get cutting in it.

If you have an open PCI slot, I've been pretty happy with the M-Audio Delta 1010. I've never run 7.1, but 5.1 has been fine and it does have 8 analog ins and outs on line-level balanced TRS, plus midi in/out and spdif in/out.

You know, I wonder - it's quite possible that you could remap to your two-channel sound card within Vegas and maintain midi connectivity through a Delta 1010 or other multichannel card.

Another option would be to send your stereo mixes to the spdif outputs of a 1010, if you're using a monitor system that accepts this directly, or, you can otherwise decode to analog.

yes I love the 1010. Since the article was ref Vegas 5, im wondering if the connection now is USB? I cant imagine why it would need MIDI connectivity unless the routing options are too difficult for the USB connect.

True broadcast quality costs money and you're looking at a dedicated sound card and external converters. Lynx makes solid cards as does RME. Entry broadcast quality converters would be something like Lavry Black or Lavry Blue. For multi channel monitoring check out the Lynx Aurora. RME makes nice mid grade multi channel converters, but I wouldn't call them broadcast quality.