Sonifex has added the PC-AD2 PCle half-height soundcard to its line of sound and radio capture cards.
‘Since we acquired Innes Corporation in 2014, we’ve had great success selling their sound cards and FM/AM/DAB radio capture cards, but more and more customers have been asking for a professional soundcard in a half-height PCIe format,’ says Sonifex MD, Marcus Brooke. ‘Many of the modern PCs only have half height card slots available - the PC-AD2 card has been designed with this in mind allowing a high channel count in a small-format card.’
The PC-AD2 is a dual-stereo analogue input/output and dual-stereo AES-3 digital input/output soundcard in the PCIe half-height format. One of the analogue inputs can be used as a dual-mono or stereo mic input, there is a dedicated AES-11 sync input and also two general -purpose (GPIO) inputs and outputs. It is fully compatible with the Windows Wave, DirectSound, DirectShow, MCI, Midi playback and Core Audio APIs as well as a variety of audio compression modes via the Windows Audio Compression Manager or other software compression systems. It supports audio up to 32bit, 192kHz and can provide full sound card functionality on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2.
When acting as a microphone input, phantom power can be applied at +48V to the microphone input connection, but is removed if Line Input 1 becomes active. An audio limiter on the mic input automatically reduces the microphone gain if the recording level approaches clipping. The peak analogue level sets the clipping threshold for the analogue inputs to one of +15, +18, +20, +22 or +24dBu corresponding to full scale on the software audio streams. The card’s core sampling rate can be synchronised to an external source chosen from either of the AES-3 inputs, the dedicated AES-11 sync input or by using an inter-card cable for synchronising to another PC-AD2.
Independent asynchronous sampling rate conversion on the inputs supports rates from 32kHz to 192kHz, while the output rate can be configured from 192kHz down to 32kHz. Software sampling rate conversion is automatically inserted by Windows ensuring that files of any sample rate can be played and recorded. Extended software bit depths of 32 and 24 bits are supported, as well as 16 and eight bits for playback and recording. For each AES-3 input, the received sampling rate, frame lock and sampling rate converter status is shown.
Multiple cards may be installed in a single PC and a 44-pin high-density D-type connector to XLRs and 9-pin D-type breakout lead is offered as an option, the PC-AD2BC. The card has been tested with Broadcast Radio Myriad, Enco DAD and RCS to ensure compatibility for radio broadcast customers.
More: http://sonifex.co.uk
